To see a video about damaged trees on campus, click here.
Fred Fellner, Facility Services assistant director for landscape services, stood in the shade of several live oak trees across from Parker Coliseum on South Stadium Road on Thursday, combing his hand through his hair while his radio crackled with work crews’ reports. Branches twisted and torn from trees scatter the ground, and Fellner’s crew is still in the early stages of removing the dying debris and restoring the campus landscape torn by Hurricane Gustav’s landfall Sept. 1.”I don’t see any particular reason that limb would fail,” Fellner said, pointing at a live oak limb     lying on the ground, nearly 10 yards long and branching out another five. “There may be a weak spot in it — some disease, fungus or maybe there was an area that was damaged before by squirrels girdling the root looking for water. A lot of the times the limbs you see fail will have some pre-existing weakness. In other cases, you might just have such significant wind in an area that it would just take out limbs no matter what. We have a complete combination of these kinds of failures.”About 100 trees fell during Gustav’s winds, 50 being “larger” in size — 12 to 36 inches in diameter at breast height, Fellner said. Breast height is 4.6 feet above ground on a tree’s trunk, according to the USDA Forrest Service Web site. As of Monday afternoon, Fellner said 80 to 85 percent of the tree-related cleanup was complete. Another 5,000 to 6,000 man-hours of labor are needed to finish the process.”We’re going to be working on limb and tree removal into the weekend,” Fellner said Monday. “It’s just like cleaning up your yard — you think you’re finished, and then you realize other things that need to get done. Now we’re moving on to South Campus, and there are a lot of trees down there.”The University’s “stately oaks,” immortalized in the alma mater for shading “inspiring halls,” were largely spared. Of these 12,000 live oaks on campus, 10 percent — maybe more — have at least some slight damage, Fellner said. Among the most trees damaged are water oaks, maples, sycamores, cow oaks and silver maples.The only “stately oak” to die at Gustav’s illusive mercy toppled behind Julian Miller Hall, where the University’s “urban forest” environment collected its toll. The tree had a weak “crotch” or “branch” structure, where limbs come together compounded by limited foot space to grow, sandwiched between Tower Drive and a parking lot, said Fellner.Piles of fallen brush rest under most live oak trees, but such damage is “not considerable,” Fellner said, as live oaks are “designed to handle it.”Fellner said nearly 140 people engaged in “wood waste vegetative removal” on campus Monday. The number of workers peaked Saturday with more than 240 people, and workers include Fellner’s employees, contracted crews and inmates.”Several hundreds of tons” of debris will be collected, loaded onto trailers and ferried off campus.”We’ll chip it and grind it and make into mulch and bring it back to campus,” Fellner said. “We actually reuse all of it.”The process is divided into three stages — safety and hazard reduction, physical cleanup, and replacement and long term care.Fellner began the first stage Sept. 2. He said campus was safe when classes resumed Monday and aims to have campus clean by the time tailgaters flood the campus for the Tigers’ Sept. 13 game against North Texas — a “reasonable goal” in his mind.Gustav cleanup on Fellner’s end will cost “well into six figures,” a bulk paying for labor, and will be complete quicker than repairs for roof or other structural damages. Fellner spent Thursday identifying trees with damage posing safety issues — limbs hanging over sidewalks or blocking traffic — with an forester consultant. His crews removed these threats before Monday.After completing cleanup, Fellner will repopulate the campus with up to 250 specimen trees, two to five inches in diameter. Replacement trees will likely be of the same species and planted in similar areas as lost ones.”We don’t want to just give up trees,” Fellner said. “We want to be able to plant a tree for a tree or maybe a couple of trees for a tree.”The repopulating process may cast $40,000 to $50,000 — $150 to $200 per specimen tree, which is doubled for labor costs and again doubled for estimating. These costs will be passed to the state.The large number of on-campus trees creates the “urban forest,” and limitations come with the landscape. These trees must cope with stress factors a normal forest doesn’t experience — vehicle and pedestrian traffic, building construction and concrete removal. This environment led a red oak in front of Middleton Library in the Quad to “pancake,” or have its roots ripped through the ground, toppling over, Fellner said. “The Quad is a very harsh environment,” Fellner said. “There is a lot of competition in there for nutrients and for light and for moisture. That tree in the long run was being out-competed by the live oak trees. Even though it looked healthy, the root structure had a lot of fungal rot in it.”The live oaks, which Fellner describes as a “green infrastructure,” were planted mostly between 1930 and 1940. Fellner said about 50 new live oaks are annually planted on campus, mostly in areas where campus is expanding, such as new buildings or parking lots and South Campus on GSRI Road.About 250 live oak trees are endowed through the LSU Foundation. Half the donated funds are in a general endowment fund while the other half are in an account used in “normal circumstances” including mulching, lightning protection, bracing and cabling, health care and fertilization. No endowment money is being used during the cleanup or re-population of trees damaged during Gustav, Fellner said. Fellner is identifying endowed trees with damage to communicate to the LSU Foundation so donors may be notified of their tree’s condition. Ten years ago, the University’s live oaks were conservatively appraised at $36 million. Today, these trees are easily worth more than $50 million, said Fellner.Gustav’s damage did not affect the live oaks’ value. A basic formula is used in forestry consulting to appraise trees, and apart from the one toppled live oak, none were impacted in a way influencing the formula’s outcome. “They have really grown to the point where they really define the landscape,” Fellner said. “They define the buildings — the arching of the limbs and the arching of the buildings themselves all speak to that renaissance architecture that we have here. They’re iconic. They’re a symbol of the University, and they’re a symbol of the part of the country we live in. Try to imagine LSU without its oaks.”—-Contact Nicholas Persac at [email protected]