It didn’t have to be this bad

A web of stately live oak limbs reaches toward the sky like a spiderweb over the rambling homestead of Richard and Torie Preis.

Hurricane Gustav took down hulking oaks and slender pines throughout their Capital Heights neighborhood as 90-mph winds howled up South Foster Boulevard and Claycut Road.

The Preises didn’t lose so much as a single large branch.

The reason, says financial executive Richard Preis, is that for the past 30 years, a professional arborist has paid an annual house call to prune, fertilize and care for their beloved trees.

“We clean our trees every year,” Preis says. “The wind just blows right through without damaging them.”

The arborist prunes the trees annually, and when necessary, injects water and fertilizer into the root systems, keeping the trees healthy and strong.

“If you’ve got pretty trees and you live in South Baton Rouge, you live there because of the trees,” Preis says. “It’s like changing the oil in your car; you have to take care of them.”

It may not be what Baton Rougeans want to hear, but had homeowners taken a more proactive approach to caring for their trees, fewer would have come down during Gustav. To be fair, all the pruning and fertilizing in the world wouldn’t have protected some fallen trees from hurricane-force winds.

But the damage would have been limited, which would mean fewer and shorter power outages, and fewer people in danger of injury. With its mature and in some cases aging urban forest, Baton Rouge was especially vulnerable to Gustav, which took out mostly water oaks, live oaks and pine trees, says tree remover Ryan Dolese.

“A large percentage” could have been saved, says Terry Robertson of DeRidder, an arborist with 33 years experience and president-elect of the Louisiana Arborists Association.

Proactive tree pruning could have prevented much of the damage, he says—the key word being pruning rather than trimming.

“There’s a difference,” Robertson says. He likens it to getting a haircut. “When you’re trimming, you’re not looking for any specific node of the tree. You just cut off everything you want. When you’re pruning, you’re looking at the structure of the tree and picking and choosing certain branches according to a five-year growth pattern.” (See related story, page 54)

The cost for a pro pruning job by an arborist ranges from about $250 to $1,200.

“It’s like going to the dentist’s office. You should go, but you don’t have to go,” says Mike Englerth, a veteran Baton Rouge arborist.

The price of failing to take proper care of trees is much higher, Robertson says. “You could pay me now or pay me later. If you pay me later, it could be $6,000.”

And that’s just for the tree. That doesn’t include the cost of tree damage done to fences, roofs and cars.

Some insurance companies didn’t help the situation after Gustav, Robertson says.

While homeowners were desperately scrambling to clear fallen trees and limbs in the powerless weeks after the storm, some insurance companies hampered the process by requiring multiple estimates before crews could do the work.

“What the insurance companies are doing is a scam,” Robertson says. “You should be able to remove your tree, keep the receipts, go to your agent and have them cut a check.”

Instead, Robertson says, homeowners got the runaround.

But Ross Henry, president of Henry Insurance Services Inc., says it wasn’t quite that simple.

“If a tree doesn’t fall on your house, depending on the policy, there’s oftentimes not much coverage,” he says. “But if it’s on your house and does damage, they’ll usually take it and pay whatever the cost for it.”

Insurance companies generally want you to “take the necessary steps to mitigate the loss,” Henry says. “It’s a good idea for the adjuster to see it. It’s a good idea to take photographs and keep receipts.”