A drink for the shade: Dan DeBard of the City Engineer's Office waters one of the trees along Ohio Boulevard Thursday afternoon as fellow employee Mike Curtis looks on. Staff photo by Joseph C. Garza
TERRE HAUTE — Bone-dry weather is threatening young and even mature trees all around the city of Terre Haute.
In the past four-and-a-half years, the city has invested about $100,000 in new trees for projects such as new Brown Boulevard, the Blakley Avenue project and the 500 Maple Avenue Nature Park, Mayor Duke Bennett said Thursday.
Now, because of the drought, those trees are threatened, so the city has hired two seasonal employees to do nothing but water the trees in an attempt to keep them alive.
“We’ve planted an awful lot of trees in the last few years,” Bennett said. “We’re going to try to water some of those trees and the downtown flower boxes to protect the investment that we’ve put into them.”
Thousands of the newest trees in the city have been donated and planted by TREES Inc., a Terre Haute not-for-profit environmental group. TREES also donated one of the watering trucks currently being used, said Sheryle Dell, the city’s urban forester.
The first five years of a tree’s life are crucial to its chance for survival, Dell noted. With this year’s drought and drier-than-usual summers the past few years, Terre Haute’s newest trees are having a truly rough start.
“It’s really a huge, huge problem,” Dell said.
Money to hire the two seasonal workers became available thanks to fewer summer hires and less need to mow grass, typically a large expense for the city, Bennett said. No new tax dollars were needed, he added.
Dell, who works in the city’s engineering department, oversees the more than 13,000 trees in the city’s “right-of-way,” mostly between sidewalks and curbs. The Terre Haute Parks Department, under superintendent Eddie Bird, handles trees in the city’s parks.
“We’ve been out trying to water the newly planted trees as many times as we can,” Bird said Thursday. In a normal year, park employees spend about one week watering new trees. This year, it’s been non-stop watering since the dry weather really took hold several weeks ago, he said.
“Especially when TREES Inc. comes in and donates a lot of trees, we want to get out and keep those trees alive,” Bird said. “It’s just one of those things that you have to do in a drought.”
The stress of the drought is visible on the trees at Dobbs Park on the city’s east side, said Carissa Lovett, naturalist at the park’s nature center.
“They just don’t look vibrant and healthy,” Lovett said pointing to the leaves of several trees in the east-side park. “It may take a couple of years for them to rebound.”
Having a healthy tree “canopy” over the city is vital to the local environment and important for the quality of life, Dell said. Trees can help cool an area up to 10 degrees by shading and their normal life-processes, she said. And the loss of a healthy canopy is often one of the first signs of urban blight, Dell said.
“I’m really worried because trees are already losing their leaves so they are not able to do what they need to do to store their energy and their resources for next year,” Dell said. “I expect to see [even mature] trees dying as a result of this into the next two years.”
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