The weekend the storm hit, arborist Jacob Holmstead was in a backcountry ski hut in Central Oregon. As heavy snow fell and winds flew at 50 miles per hour around him, Holmstead went in search of cell service.

“I hiked up to the top of the area where we were skiing, and my phone was just blowing up,” he says. “I had to pack up and ride out of there. I went straight to a job. It’s been full-throttle.”

Holmstead is co-owner of Samsara Tree Care, a tree service with locations in Portland and Camas. Samsara, along with every other local company like it, has been very busy since the freezing rain and gale-force winds of January’s winter storm brought down trees across the area. These downed trees and limbs (as of February 1, Portland's urban forestry department had logged more than 750 instances) blocked roads, destroyed homes, and left 150,000 Portland households without power. In Lake Oswego, a tree fell on a house and killed a man. In Southeast Portland, a woman died when a tree fell on her parked RV and started a fire.

Why were Portland’s trees so vulnerable?

Fifty mph gusts like the ones that whipped through Portland on January 13 would have taken down trees anywhere, whether on a city street or in the forest. But urban trees are different than those in, say, Mt. Hood National Forest, or even those in Forest Park. Out there, trees cluster, which gives them a natural resilience to wind. In the city, many of our four million trees stand alone—think of the maples and elms lining the blocks of a neighborhood like Laurelhurst. Trees like these have also spent their lives reaching for the light, relatively unchecked by others, which means their crowns have expanded in a way they wouldn’t in a forest—which gives the wind more surface to latch onto.

Still, these sorts of solo trees often fare better than, for instance, the few Douglas firs that once grew among others but now soldier on alone, the rest of their stand having been cleared for subdivision construction. Trees that have always stood alone “tend to be more wind-firm, because they’ve had to endure and reinforce themselves from the very beginning,” says Scott Altenhoff, who manages community and urban forestry for the Oregon Department of Forestry. “But a tree that grew up in a stand that’s now fully exposed—those are going to be at much greater risk because they haven’t had the time and inclination to reinforce themselves below or above ground.”

The wind wasn’t the only element at play. Three inches of rain had fallen on Portland in the week preceding the storm, which meant that the city’s soils were saturated—allowing roots to yank free from the earth more readily. “As any gardener knows, if you try and pull a weed when the moisture levels are high, it’s easy,” Altenhoff says. “In many cases, the trees aren’t what failed. It’s the soil that failed to hold.”

Through the arborist’s eyes

“It’s carnage out there,” says Holmstead, who says it’s the worst devastation he’s seen since he began as an arborist in 2014, with far more damage than occurred during the storm that crusted Portland in ice a few days before Christmas in 2022. That storm caused mostly broken limbs and branches: canopy failure, in arborist parlance.

This time, trees toppled over entirely. And within a day or two, freezing rain had slicked the city in ice, and work ground to a near-halt.

“We couldn’t move,” Holmstead says. “Not only could we barely get to your site in a pickup, but I couldn’t dispatch a trailer. We didn’t use trailers at all for four or five days.”

The work is not just about clearing what’s come down, but about assessing potential threat from weakened-but-still-standing trees. And access, especially in places like the Southwest Hills—“ground zero,” says Holmstead—is a major challenge. “There are backyards that just go straight down to ravines,” Holmstead says. “You can’t get in spider lifts or cranes. You can’t even access them with ropes. There are some real head-scratchers on how we can safely even bring a lot of these things down. There’s some very dangerous trees out there still.” 

Samsara’s doing four to five jobs per day, on top of 10 to 15 assessments, and Holmstead’s been working 15-hour shifts. As new information comes in, he’s constantly reprioritizing—which clients aren’t always happy to hear. When I reached him last week, he told me it had been a one-cry day.

“We went from two crews to four crews to five crews overnight,” Holmstead says. “Things are by the hour. It’s absolutely been happening at lightning speed. That can be overwhelming, and sometimes you’re just driving to a site and you start crying, and you’re like, whoaaa.”

One source of support: Holmstead says he’s gotten calls from arborists as far away as Ohio and Kansas who’ve traveled to Portland to assist, and Samsara has been working daily with a Salt Lake City–based company that brought its knuckle boom crane to town—a truck-mounted, articulating crane that Holmstead calls “the tool for the storm.” Even so, he expects to be dealing with immediate hazards for several more weeks, and for cleanup efforts to go on for months.

Is this avoidable?

Altenhoff suggests property owners take on more preventative care. 

“Have a trained professional give an assessment about tree risk potential, and ask the vital question: what treatments can be undertaken to give these trees a greater chance of making it through an extreme weather event?” he says. Just as cars and homes need maintenance, so do trees. “Typically, that can be some judicious pruning. We can also supplement with support systems like cabling or bracing. A lot can be done to make trees more wind-firm or stormproof.”

It’ll be a budget line item, one that could range anywhere from a few hundred dollars to several thousand depending on the scope of the work. But will it be less financially (and emotionally) taxing than hiring Holmstead to clear a tree from your kitchen? Also yes.