(The following story by Anne Blythe appeared on the News-Observer website on August 9.)
DURHAM, N.C. — It looks like a posse of crazed beavers attacked the main rail line through Durham, leaving behind a trail of ravaged stumps and limbs.
In fact, the arboreal wreckage prompting complaints across the city was the work of Norfolk Southern railroad crews.
Federal safety rules require the rail owners to routinely clear tall trees and vegetation growing in the right-of-way that’s too close to the tracks.
“They understand the concerns going through a metropolitan area like ours,” said Kevin Lilley, facilities operations manager with the city’s landscape urban-forestry department. “What they’re doing is removing material that people are accustomed to seeing.
“The cedars were planted there a long time ago as a buffer,” Lilley added, “but with the guidelines the railroad is required to follow, they can’t have anything that’s going to be more than 3 feet tall.”
The city has permission to trim the craggy stumps near Main and Broad streets, Lilley said, and then put mulch over them.
With the tree-cutting along the rail lines, along with Duke Power crews heavily pruning trees under utility lines, there has been much buzz lately about the state of the Bull City’s trees.
Randy Pickle, a Durham resident, went to the City Council this week with photos of hundreds of dead trees in 22 public parks.
“From my small window on the world over here, we’ve got a lot of dead trees,” Pickle said.
Lilley, who is in charge of the city’s six-member tree crew, says the recent drought has taken a toll on the city’s leafy canopy.
His crew has identified 118 park trees that need to come down. There could be more dead park trees, Lilley added, but if they are not close to play areas or places where they could fall on a sports field or where people gather, they are not high priority.
“We do allow some trees to naturally fall,” Lilley said. “They do provide habitat for woodpeckers and other wildlife.”
Lilley and his crew try to be quick to respond to any complaints about damaged trees.
They know many of the willow and water oaks arching over Durham’s sidewalks are nearing the end of their lives. Many were planted in the 1930s, and oaks hemmed in by sidewalks and streets rarely survive for more than 75 years, Lilley said.
“We’ve got two things going on here,” Lilley said. “For the street trees, we are seeing the decline of those because of where we have them. What we’re experiencing in the parks, however, they are showing the effects of three years of the last five of drought, which is putting the trees under stress and allowing beetles and other pests to come in.”
Pickle and others hope the city will soon be able to focus more attention on the trees still standing.
“I can’t save a dead tree,” Pickle said. But, he added, existing trees could be saved.
“We do absolutely no tree maintenance,” Pickle lamented.