Trees most susceptible to storm damage

Took a woods walk around my acreage to see if I could spot some candidates to take down. Looking for dead and or storm damaged. Seems certain species are much hardier than others. Red Maple, Black Birch, Yellow Birch, White Birch, Black Cherry, Poplar and Eastern White Pine are the ones that always seem to be broken. The Red and White Oaks,Hickories, and Rock Maples hang tough.

How about in your neck of the woods?

 

Same here. I’ll add black locust to the list because of their shallow root systems and tendency to grow disproportionately tall reaching for sunlight. A good stiff wind mows them right over. I noticed willows like to splinter apart too, especially the ones out in the open with no shelter trees nearby to buffet the wind.

 

As Eric stated the BL seems to snap easily and blowover. My observations are its on the brittle side. Thanks to Isiais and the tornado later in August 2020 i got a boatload of it. Still lots to be had from both storms.

Bigger winds seem to blowover oaks in my woods although dead/dying beech and dead ash get the brunt of it.

 

Virginia Pines topple over if the sun is too bright. Every storm you can pretty much expect to see Va pines on the ground or on power lines.
I’ve been with the same trees for 30yrs and it seems to be cyclical except for Va pine being a constant. There will be a wave of Red Oak failures, Red Maples, Hickory, White Oak.
I’ve wondered if it’s age or precipitation related. The year red oaks were working me to death we had a really wet spring and wondered if the trees were putting on so much new foliage and stem growth that the reaction wood could not keep pace and they self destructed. My wood piles follow the cycles also. The past couple years tropical systems were hard on White Oaks. On my home lot in the past several years I’ve lost a Loblolly Pine, White Oak and a big Red Maple top in storms. Some Poplar limbs have broken out too.
The neighbors had a couple Va Pines fall onto my lot. If we get Ice Va Pines fall like dominos.

 

For me it's pine trees,big maples the ones that season fast,and trees rotting from the inside.

 

Nothing worse than Bradford Pear! They snap in two with a cool summer breeze. Another reason to make firewood out of them! And they make dandy firewood if you can split the knots.

'Brads' are an "engineered tree" used too much by developers. They're something like 80% crown and 20% trunk. The results:

 

Here it's the elms that fall apart in the storms. Never really the main trunk just the big limbs. Alot of people around here don't maintain their yard trees. In the national forest it's the white firs that fall in the storms.

 

The slower the growth, the higher winds it will weather.


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Here in Dakotah Territory there isn't a tremendous variety of trees and an abundance of wind, but the 2 most common wind damaged are spruce and anything in the populus family of trees (cottonwood, aspen, poplar, willow). I try to just due to the nature of the northern great plains lack of trees, only take storm damaged trees or if someone is removing a tree. Fortunately I have access to the city tree dump and get a fair share of ash that people are taking out. Another thing that helps is having made contacts with farmers that let me scavenge shelter belts for dead or damaged and have scored a lot of wood. I take some of the lower btu populus for shoulder and fire pit but try to avoid the spruce as at least here they split terribly because they are pinned together with all the branch cores in the main trunk.

 

#1 Box Elder - always rotting out on the inside, scary to climb with any confidence and the first to break up in a storm
#2 Any type of Willow - in my area they are the first to form leaves and one of the last to lose them, with the added mass for snow to accumulate equaling an early or late snow always breaks them up
#3 Siberian Elm - again, in my area heavy early or late snows break them up before they drop their leaves or just after they put them on

I rarely see any tree uprooted. It would have to be a microburst or some other anomoly that isn't typical to this region.

 

We had a storm back in late October, rain and high winds. This storm was bad for oak trees or anything that still had leaves on it. Most trees uprooted because the root system couldn't hold on, those that didn't uproot got pretty banged up. Pines seem to have a bad time when it snows, then that snow freezes to the pines and then you bring in some winds.

 

Around here we see silver maple large branches snap off where it grows on the main trunk. Sometimes a load of freezing rain ice overloads ‘em and sometimes a good wind takes them down. Years ago a 12 inch side branch dropped on the power line feeding our house, breaking the telephone pole in half and bending the power mast on the house. Glad to get firewood from these mishaps and fortunate that they didn’t cause property damage or injury.

 

What trees are most susceptible to storm damage? The ones in storms lol

 

Big oaks seem to blow down more than most trees in high wind when the ground is wet. Pines seem to roll with the punches.

 

Yep, around here, it is oaks. Ground gets saturated with heavy rain, a strong wind from a thunderstorm occurs, and the biguns fall with huge root balls intact. They have broad, shallow root systems seems to me.

 

Siberian elm, silver maple and willow are the most common hardwood victims to storm damage around me.

 

Well in those 70 mph winds we had the other day, I drove by a guys house today that had a shagbark hickory break and fall. I've never seen one snapped at the trunk from a storm. This is a 16-20" dbh tree.

I don't know this guy, but I left him a card with my phone number on it letting them know that I can clean up their fallen tree. It's on my way to my buddy's house and easy to get to. I might even do this job in exchange for the wood.