'Just so shocking': Charlottetown crews assess tree damage from Fiona

Charlottetown parks superintendent Nancy McMinn said she couldn't find the words to describe how she felt when she first saw the destruction in Victoria Park. 

"It was just so shocking. I've been around for quite a few devastations — Hurricane Juan, White Juan, Hurricane Dorian — nothing compares to what I saw. Nothing," said McMinn. 

"When we went and did our initial assessment, we couldn't find any paths to walk on. Every single path was was just covered with trees, downed trees, hangers. Devastation, wherever you looked."

McMinn said city crews have been at Victoria Park since the storm, clearing out the front fields and around the infrastructure, but haven't started on the interior of the woods.

Forest rejuvenation

The city has called in Gary Schneider from Macphail Woods, who helped to create a woodlot management plan for the park, to discuss a rejuvenation plan for the Victoria Park forest. 

"This is an Acadian forest, and we have many trees that have reached their maturity age, which would be a lot of the birch trees here," McMinn said. 

"Some of the other trees aren't in great shape, some of the beech trees. So we'll be looking at possibly some trees that will handle climate change better. We'll be looking at native trees."

McMinn said the city has conducted an initial assessment of all the parks in the city, and almost every park has trees down.

She said the crews are working 11 hour days, seven days a week, to get the assessments done so they can prioritize what needs to be done. 

"We're hoping that this will be a rejuvenation, a positive thing. We'll be able to establish better, more defined trails," McMinn said. 

"We'll get to have lots of new plantings. I think it'll be positive in the end." 

Urban forestry experts

In a fortuitous twist, the city hosted an urban forestry conference this week, and some of the delegates have jumped in to help. 

On Tuesday, they were at seven parks across Charlottetown, helping to triage the tree damage from Fiona.

"If there's something that looks like it might be an immediate hazard to the public, that would be higher priority," said Jessika Corkum-Gorrill, acting environment and sustainability manager for the city.

"Something that is maybe needing care, but not immediate care, that would get bumped down to lower priority."

"We will know from doing these quick assessments where the priority parks are, where the priority streets are, where we have to go back and do more immediate work, and which ones can wait a little bit longer, and get to those in the next year or so."

Corkum-Gorrill said the city was fortunate to have the participation of the urban forest experts.

"I think it'll mean we'll get our parks open faster, and they will be safer for the public definitely more quickly," said Corkum-Gorrill.

 "To have dozens of tree assessors at our fingertips for a few days is definitely going to speed things up in that regard."

Philip van Wassenaer, an arborist and president of Urban Forest Innovations in Mississauga, Ont., was one of the conference experts helping with the tree assessments. 

"From the positive side, I'm thrilled that actually there's a lot of trees here that are standing that don't have any damage, and that's a testament to to these trees, and what they can actually do and withstand," van Wassenaer said.

 "It's also a chance for renewal. Maybe selecting different species would increase the variety, look at patterns of the failure," van Wassenaer said.

"Were there certain trees that were more problematic than others? And maybe we steer away from those in the future. So there's always lessons to be learned from this type of event."