Gnarled trees line KC streets following January ice storm

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The boulevards and parkways that lead to this city's many fountains were once lined with leafy, mature trees. Weeks after the city's worst ice storm, many trees are gnarled and limbless.

The storm that swept across Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri in late January temporarily knocked out power to about a million homes, caused more than $50 million in damage and led to federal disaster declarations in 123 counties.

An inch of ice on nearly every surface also damaged about two-thirds of the trees in a 40-mile wide swath across the three states, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

Nobody knows how many trees were damaged, but officials have estimated that roughly 80 percent of Kansas City-area trees suffered. Enough branches and trunks have been removed from the city to fill 79,000-seat Arrowhead Stadium to the rim, officials here said.

Looking on bright side

Ice 2 inches thick snapped all the branches of a 70-foot pin oak in Sean Reilly's lawn in Overland Park, Kan., a Kansas City suburb. The tree had to be removed, but he's trying keep positive about the sunlight now hitting his front yard.

"It will give me a chance to redesign my landscaping, which my wife and I have been talking about," said Reilly, 43. "It opens it up, gives us more sunlight so we can use a wider variety of plants."

At least 10,000 acres of forest were damaged in Oklahoma, including 80 percent of the trees in scenic Red Rock Canyon State Park, said Mark Bays, urban forestry coordinator with that state's Agriculture Department.

Broken branches littering the forest floor increases the risk of fires, Bays said. The debris could also allow a small ground blaze to ignite damaged tree tops, a potentially more dangerous and difficult fire to put out, he said.

"Some of the trees had been providing beneficial services for 100 years or more," Bays said. "It's going to take decades to begin replacing what we've lost because of one storm. It's easy to restore power and fix roofs pretty quickly, but when you think how long it takes for a tree to grow."

Also damaged were shelter belts -- rows of trees and shrubs designed to slow the winds that turned Oklahoma into a dust bowl in the 1930s, Bays said. Foresters are still working to determine the extent of that damage, he said.

The damage to Kansas trees has turned out to be more extensive than officials originally thought, said Eric Berg, an urban and community forestry coordinator with the Kansas Forest Service. Some 80 percent of trees along streets were damaged in southeast Kansas, he said.

On the plus side, most of those trees were non-native, soft-wooded trees like the Siberian elm and the silver maple, which will hopefully prompt homeowners to plant more hardy, native species as replacements, Berg said.

The oaks, ashes and hard maples that thrived in eastern Kansas before European settlers arrived were virtually unharmed by the ice, Berg said. Trees in forests can lean on each other for support, a luxury not available to the well-spaced trees of cities, he said.

"There are areas in Kansas where upward of 30 percent of trees may need to come down in the near future," Berg said.

Metro area hit hardest

In Missouri, the hardest hit were the metropolitan areas, especially eastern and southern Kansas City, said Butch DuCote, FEMA's spokesman in Kansas City.

Torn parts of trees were piled as high as ten feet in front of some Kansas City houses after the storm. In Warrensburg, ice toppled several shady elms as old as the Central Missouri State University campus they formerly adorned.

Nearly 17,000 Missourians applied for and received about $2.2 million in federal disaster housing relief because they lost power or their homes were damaged by falling tree limbs, DuCote said.

About 8,000 Kansans applied for some type of federal disaster relief, receiving more than $1.5 million, said Joe Klocek, with FEMA's effort in Emporia, Kan.