North Bay arborists, roofers swamped with calls after destructive bomb cyclone

Zach Wilkerson is a certified arborist who has cleared downed trees in the wake of hurricanes on the Gulf Coast and a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Now the general manager of TreePro in Santa Rosa, he’s spent the last three days getting trees off homes and cars and property, following the bomb cyclone that raked the North Bay with gale- and hurricane-force winds Sunday.

Where Wilkerson and his crew might make five visits in a day on average, they looked at 20 properties Monday, when his workday started at 4 a.m. and ended 16 hours later.

“This is very much like that work back in the southeast, and the Gulf Coast. A lot of my crew has never experienced anything like this,” he said.

“I’ve been hearing from people around the county that they’ve never seen this kind of weather event here. It’s been insane.”

By late Tuesday afternoon, Julie Sturgeon, a marketing specialist and project manager at Atlas Tree Service in Santa Rosa, was close to losing her voice after fielding a deluge of calls that started Monday morning. She worked 12 hours that day, taking about “50%” more calls than usual.

“We had eight trees that came down in the storm within one hour,” Sturgeon said. “The tallest one was 80 feet and barely missed the house. The wife was outside a minute before the husband yelled at her to get inside.”

Edgar J. Salas, owner of Vema Tree Service in Santa Rosa, also recalled a chilling situation after a tree had fallen into a bedroom at a home in Forestville, missing a baby in bed by a couple of inches.

“He was a lucky guy,” Salas said.

Back at TreePro, Wilkerson and his crew were out in the elements Sunday, “getting wet, getting blown around, doing whatever we could to help.” That included responding to a call in Bodega, where a downed Monterey cypress had crushed the front right corner of a home.

After “running down the hill to get better cell service,” he returned to discover that the tree had settled further, “crushing the corner another two or three feet.”

That fluid situation underscored for Wilkerson that, on some occasions, to act fast.

“Every bit of time we wait could mean more of that home that can’t be salvaged,” he said.

Extreme weather events force arborists like Wilkerson to prioritize jobs. A tree on a home is “priority one,” he said. A tree blocking a driveway, preventing occupants from leaving, “is almost the same level. If they can’t escape, you need to get them cut out, so they can find shelter.”

Jeff Rebischung, owner of Fine Tree Care in Sebastopol, said his company had received about 70 calls over Monday and Tuesday, and that trees are continuing to fall in the aftermath of the storms.

“We’re seeing a lot of predictable, preventable failures from structural defects that are readily apparent … that if we'd had an opportunity to provide service to the tree, we would have found those defects as part of our inspection,” Rebischung said. “It is much better to have the preventive care ahead of time. It’s a lot less risky for everybody — the homeowners and the workers who have to go out there and do this kind of work.”

Practicing ‘tree-age’

Mariah Sandborn checked the dashboard on her laptop around lunchtime Tuesday.

“Since Sunday through right now,” said Sandborn, operations manager at Sandborn Tree Service in Sebastopol, “we’ve gotten, conservatively, 55 calls” — 90% of them storm-related.

In the wake of a storm that left so much damage, “We do a lot of what I punningly call ‘tree-age,’” she said.

The focus, she said, is on saving lives first, property second.

She might respond more quickly to a tree leaning toward and threatening a home before sending a crew to a house with a tree limb already on it — if that structure hasn’t been damaged.

“If a tree is threatening a building or home that’s inhabited then I’m going to probably focus on that,” she said. “If a tree’s already down on a house, of course I want to get out there and take a look and see what we can do, but chances are insurance is going to slow it down.”

Before a tree is removed, “an insurance component” often comes into play, “where the homeowner doesn’t want us to remove (the tree) until they get the adjuster out,” she said.

“But if we can get out there remove something, tarp it, and come back later to finish, we’ll try.”

Patrick Mounce, North Bay district manager for The Davey Tree Expert Co., estimated that he’d taken 30 storm-related calls. The majority involved trees falling onto and into houses.

Like Wilkerson, he was calling in huge cranes to extricate massive trees from homes.

Too dangerous to work

Not all the damage wrought by the storm resulted from trees in and on homes, though. Fierce winds detached gutters, stripped shingles — and, with a frequency that surprised Letitia Hanke — skylights from roofs.

Hanke is CEO of ARS Roofing in Santa Rosa. Like an on-call doctor, Hanke didn’t turn her phone off Saturday night, as the bomb cyclone blew in.

Her first call came in shortly after 5 a.m. Sunday. “It was a roof leak” — and the roof was tile.

With wind gusts whipping as fast as 60 mph in the lowlands — much higher at more elevated locations — Hanke made the call: She wasn’t sending any of her employees up in those perilous conditions.

“That’s the decision I made Sunday,” she said. “That their lives are more important than the storm.”

That turned Hanke’s Sunday into a series of hand-holding calls with distressed homeowners.

“I walked them through what they could do in the meantime,” she said.

To people who saw bubbling in their ceilings, “I told them to poke a hole, and let the water drain out.” And then she set them up for Monday.

She seemed slightly surprised by the number of skylights the cyclone sheared off peoples’ roofs, and was forced to plead with one homeowner over the phone to please not send his tenant up on their roof to tarp over a rectangle left by a missing window.

“I said please don’t do that,” she recalled. “Please don’t have your tenant who’s not covered under worker’s comp go up there on the roof.”

The volume of calls coming in since that 5 a.m. Sunday wake-up call has been staggering.

Rich Tice, owner of Santa Rosa-based Brothers That Just Do Gutters, didn’t send his workers out Sunday either.

“We can work through torrential rains all day long,” he said, “but it’s the wind that really gets us. When the winds are that high we can’t be up on the ladder safely.

“It’s just unsafe, even with fall protection.”

Before and after the storm, Tice and his crew have responded to numerous requests from people who want their gutters unclogged.

They’ll get up on a ladder and discover their gutters need more work.

Many older homes in the North Bay, he said, have gutters with “an older hanger system. The hangers we use these days are much sturdier.”

Following high wind events like with Sunday’s, he said, gutters are sometimes not only clogged, “but we’re seeing them pull off homes.”

That’s not the sort of maintenance it’s wise to defer.

“Water finds the path of least resistance,” he said. “It will find its way into your windows, your door frames, inside your walls. Once that starts happening, now we got a bigger problem.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.

North Bay Business Journal staff writer Cheryl Sarfaty contributed to this report.