After the storm: daunting task of cleaning up debris
It will take decades for devastated N.D.G. Park to fully recover
The power is returning and most streets have reopened, but it will take weeks to clear the debris and decades for a Montreal jewel — N.D.G. Park — to return to its leafy glory.
On Wednesday, residents of blacked-out streets awoke to the buzz of chainsaws in the west-end neighbourhood as Hydro- Québec crews, city blue-collar workers and private tree-trimmers cleaned up and made repairs after Tuesday’s brief but powerful storm left a trail of destruction in its wake.
The “microburst,” which witnesses say lasted from 30 seconds to two or three minutes, devastated trees, which in turned cut powerlines and damaged homes and cars over a three-kilometre area. The worst hit swath stretched from Mayfair and Somerled Aves. to Prud’homme Ave. and Sherbrooke St. There were no reports of serious injuries.
Russell Copeman, mayor of the Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Damede-Grâce borough, said about 50 to 100 trees — some of them more than 100 years old — were severely damaged. In the affected area, the damage was as extensive or worse than the 1998 Ice Storm, he added.
By the end of Wednesday, all N.D.G. streets were expected to have reopened, with power restored to the vast majority of homes, he said. However, it will take several weeks to clear the branches and tree trunks that line many sidestreets.
Workers will go through the affected area again in the coming weeks looking for weakened or damaged branches and trees that could fall in a windstorm, Copeman said.
The storm devastated the borough’s biggest park — N.D.G. Park, at Girouard Ave. and Sherbrooke St. Many trees, some of which have shaded playing children, dog walkers and picnickers for decades, were snapped like twigs by the force of the storm. Copeman said the park will be closed for several days while workers clear downed trees. After that, city experts will take a closer look to see which trees can be saved and which must be felled.
“Then we’ll start looking at replanting trees, but even if we plant fast-growing trees, it’s going to be decades before the park comes back to the way it was,” Copeman said.
On Wednesday, in sections of the park where damaged trees were close to sidewalks, workers were cutting branches and feeding them to a wood chipper, as crowds of onlookers took photos from Sherbrooke St.
Brenda Keesal, a resident of nearby Hingston Ave., was surveying the damage at the park.
She watched the storm from a nearby café on Tuesday.
“All of a sudden everything went horizontal — the gusts of wind were so strong, I couldn’t keep the heavy wooden door closed. It kept whooshing open.”
In the café, “there was a moment of complete chaos and fear. Torrential rain, explosive wind.”
She said a woman walking along Sherbrooke suffered a bad cut when flying glass hit her arm. A veterinarian from a nearby clinic helped clean the wound, but “there was a lot of blood and she needed major stitches,” Keesal said.
A series of violent storms swept across Quebec on Tuesday. In Lachute, 80 kilometres northwest of Montreal, a tornado touched down. Environment Canada estimated winds reached 175 kilometres per hour. Forty people were forced from their homes; there were no serious injuries.
While as capable as a tornado to create damage, a microburst is a sudden and powerful downdraft that usually occurs during severe thunderstorms.
N.D.G. was the hardest hit part of Montreal, but several other areas were also affected, including CôteSt-Luc and Lachine.
Environment Canada said winds in N.D.G. reached 120 kilometres an hour during the microburst.
In N.D.G., several cars and homes were damaged by falling branches and trees. Between Melrose and Girouard avenues on Wednesday, some homes remained pinned under trees the storm had pushed onto them. In some cases, on Harvard and Benny Aves., for example, the wind ripped trees out of the ground, roots and all.
On Prince of Wales Ave. Wednesday, Carlo Tatarelli was surveying the crew using a chainsaw on a thick branch that had snapped near the top of his neighbour’s tree.
In front of his house, a heavy branch from his own tree lay on his lawn.
“I’m not a horticulturist, but that does not look healthy,” he said, pointing to an area that appeared to be rotten.
“And if you look at the tree, a good part of it is dead. There are no leaves on the branches.”
He said the borough put up noparking and tree-maintenance signs on his street recently, then came back three days later and removed them without doing any work.
“It’s a blessing that it happened like this rather than fall on someone’s head,” Tatarelli said of the fallen branch.
On nearby Walkley Ave., a fallen tree blocked the width of the street as well as sidewalks. A closer look at the area where it snapped during the storm revealed that it was hollow because of rotting.
But Copeman said the “unprecedented local weather event” should be blamed for the extensive tree damage, not poor maintenance.
Côte-des-Neiges-N.D.G., which has 35,000 trees on public property, does regular inspections and trimming, he said.
Several Hydro-Québec poles were snapped six feet off the ground, he noted.
“If you get a Hydro pole that’s in good condition, well-maintained and that doesn’t have to be trimmed, snapping like that, I think it’s inaccurate to start suggesting that poor maintenance is responsible for the tree damage,” Copeman said.
Jim Fyles, the director of the Morgan Arboretum in Ste-Annede-Bellevue and a McGill University professor, said the intensity and energy of the storm was “very localized” and “all the energy (was) concentrated on small areas” like N.D.G.
Fyles said that, while he is not familiar with the trees of N.D.G., he believes the sheer magnitude of the storm was enough to damage just about any type of tree.
“I think it was just a very, very intense storm,” Fyles said. “I think lots of trees are down and are broken and they weren’t sick. They weren’t rotten necessarily. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”