Between California storms, let’s heed the dying message of Sacramento’s toppled trees | Opinion
Sacramento’s William Land Park looks like a battlefield.
Dozens of huge trees, some more than 100 years old, lie parallel to the sodden ground, their root systems exposed to the light for the first time since Woodrow Wilson was president. The smell of exposed soil and splintered wood hangs in the air, a portent of more to come.
And it will come.
The downed trees crisscross the grass, permanently altering the park’s beloved nine-hole golf course. Onlookers take photos and videos with their phones, trying to process what their eyes can’t believe.
During the decade I’ve lived here, I’ve seen the odd tree fall somewhere in the park in winter, but nothing, until now, that made me see the whole landscape in a different light.
In midtown Sacramento, trees toppled by 70 mph wind gusts smashed houses, crushed cars and snapped power lines and branches, leaving the kind of precarious limbs that my dad, a U.S. Forest Service employee, used to call “widow-makers,” dangling like the sword of Damocles.
On Sutterville Road, a huge pine tree lay across a power line, hanging in suspension like some weird improvised Miró sculpture. Neighbors gaped at the damage and looked warily at the remaining trees, once permanent-seeming fixtures now looking as transitory as a leaf in the wind.
Why the tree apocalypse now?
Any climate scientist will tell you the short version: Years of drought fried the trees’ root systems, and then the rainstorms saturated the ground until all it took was a stiff wind to knock them down. In addition, a lot of the trees in Land Park and other locations across the city were planted in shallow soil, making them unusually top-heavy.
Here in the City of Trees, the atmospheric rivers hitting Northern California reportedly felled almost a thousand of them in six days. A man strolling through Land Park exclaimed that the scene reminded him of the aftermath of a tornado in his native Missouri.
Californians are used to playing bystanders to the rock-and-roll-anything-goes meteorology of other parts of the country. We rarely get the tornadoes that rip up the South and Midwest — though a moderate one did touch down in Calaveras County on Tuesday. We don’t get hurricanes, either; that’s the South and the East.
We do, of course, get rain, and we often pray for it. But not this much, not this fast, not in relentless atmospheric rivers.
In Sacramento, we have to take some comfort in recent levee upgrades and hope for the best. It’s common knowledge here that among the nation’s leading catastrophic flood risks, Sacramento may be second only to another reclaimed swamp, New Orleans, which Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed in 2005.
But we never think about that. We build more McMansions in Natomas even though the city is a mere 26 feet above sea level.
Friends from all over the country texted and called in recent days, asking if we were OK. The news showing frightening images from all over the state makes it look as if California could indeed slide into the ocean without so much as an assist from the Big One.
After gutting out fire season after fire season — was it ever not fire season? — we now contend with biblical flood. And apparently it’s not even enough to end the drought.
“It’s going to take many methods and several wet years to make up for the region’s long period of low rainfall,” UC Santa Cruz hydrologist Andrew Fisher wrote recently. “One storm certainly doesn’t do it, and even one wet year doesn’t do it.”
Welcome to the climate future of California. We ignored the warnings, and now we’ll dodge firestorms in the summer and atmospheric rivers in the winter. Rinse, repeat.
Maybe we’ll see the forest for the trees now that they’re falling on us.
