Valley fire survivors in Lake County now facing danger from dead trees

Cindy Leonard and Cathy McCarthy are among hundreds of people who lost their homes when the Valley fire raged through southern Lake County in September 2015.

Now, as they work on rebuilding their Cobb Mountain-area homes and lives, they have a new worry: Their efforts could be damaged by still standing dead trees toppling over from stormy weather or on their own.

The fire burned 76,067 acres killing millions of trees, destroying almost 2,000 structures and causing the deaths of at least four people.

Since December, two homes have been damaged when fire-weakened trees broke and fell on them, said Lake County Supervisor Rob Brown. The identities of those homeowners have not been released. A construction worker's truck also was smashed.

Leonard, 50, and McCarthy, 42, had the trees on their properties evaluated, and the dead and dying ones removed. But not all of their neighbors have followed suit.

“I think they wanted to cling onto them a bit longer,” Leonard said. Or they may have balked at the cost, which can range anywhere between $100 and $1,200 per tree, depending on size and proximity to a structure. Leonard was able to keep the costs of removing some 80 trees from her property to about $10,000 by selling the marketable ones and obtaining assistance from the Natural Resources Conservation Office and a local church to offset a portion of the cost.

Some of their Cobb-area neighbors have not only left burned trees in place, but resisted efforts by county, state and private utility officials to remove trees seen as a threat to roads, and power and phone lines. An online petition was started, and some residents alleged healthy trees were being cut down by overzealous utility and roads officials.

But Brown said sentiment appears to be shifting.

“We went from ‘don't touch our trees' to ‘remove all of our trees.' It's full circle here,” Brown said.

Greg Giusti, a forest advisor with the UC Cooperative Extension , said once trees fell on structures, “people are waking up.”

He believes the resistance to tree removal was a part of the grieving process for people who lost everything to the fire, including their forests.

“It was a perfectly expected and natural reaction to the stress and anxiety people were going through at the time,” Giusti said. In addition, many of the dead and dying trees were still green, giving the appearance they could recover.

“I had to cut underneath the bark, look at the cambium layer” - the thin layer of growing tissue that produces new cells - to determine viability early on, Giusti said. With the passage of time, he said, it's much easier to tell which trees are dead or dying.

Giusti estimated there are thousands of potentially hazardous trees in the Cobb Mountain area.

At the behest of county advisory group Cobb Area Council, the Lake County Board of Supervisors last month adopted a new ordinance that provides what officials hope will be an effective a way for residents to deal with potentially dangerous trees on other people's properties.

Those concerned about neighbors' trees can ask the county to remove them after following a process that includes first notifying neighbors of the problem, Brown said. If the neighbor doesn't respond, the suspected tree would be evaluated by a forester and then removed by the county if deemed a hazard to a home, Brown said. It must be capable of seriously damaging a home - not just falling on the neighbor's property - to trigger a county abatement, he said. Giusti has been asked to make the evaluations.

Owners of trees removed by the county will be billed for the costs and could have liens placed on their properties to secure payment, Brown said.

McCarthy, worried that several of a neighbor's trees could damage her new home, said she sent the neighbor a letter last week, asking to have the trees evaluated by a certified arborist. She has yet to receive a response.

There's no set time for a response to a letter, but Brown said property owners with suspect trees likely would be given at least a week, maybe two - depending on how dangerous the situation is - before the county sends someone to evaluate the trees. If deemed to be a danger, the property owner would have 48 hours to remove the trees or the county would step in.

The county additionally has implemented a requirement that people sign statements that there are no hazardous trees that could fall onto their homes before they're allowed to start construction, Brown said.

“Now that we're on notice, we're not going to put people in harm's way,” he said.

Click here for information about tree removal resources.

You can reach Staff Writer Glenda Anderson at 707-462-6473 or glenda.anderson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MendoReporter.