Winter Storm Preparation PART 1

Michael Spaulding from Davey's Portland, OR office talks about what an arborist does to prepare for winter storms and what homeowners can do to help, as well as how Portland's January 2024 storm affected Davey's office, clients and trees in the area. 

In this episode we cover:  

• What does an arborist do to prepare for a winter storm? (0:40) (5:33)
• How long can storm work take? (2:09)
• Portland's January 2024 storm (3:22) (7:48)
• What homeowners can do before a storm (6:37)
• Annual visits with an arborist (8:33)
• How Michael became an arborist (10:53)
• What Michael loves about his job (12:35)
• Portland's season (13:36)
• Lasting effects from Portland's January 2024 storm (15:05)

To find your local Davey office, check out our find a local office page to search by zip code.

To learn more about preparing for winter storms, read our blog, Your Backyard Tree Checklist for the Winter Storm Season.

Connect with Davey Tree on social media:
Twitter: @DaveyTree
Facebook: @DaveyTree
Instagram: @daveytree
YouTube: The Davey Tree Expert Company
LinkedIn: The Davey Tree Expert Company 

Connect with Doug Oster at www.dougoster.com. 

Have topics you'd like us to cover on the podcast? Email us at podcasts@davey.com. We want to hear from you!

Transcript

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Doug Oster: Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oster. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more, because here at the Talking Trees podcast, we know trees are the answer.

Today, I'm joined by Michael Spaulding. He's a district manager in Portland, Oregon for the Davey Tree Expert Company. I'm very excited about our topic today, Michael, all about getting ready for storms. Welcome to the show. It's good to see you and talk to you.

Michael Spaulding: Thank you for having me, Doug.

Doug: I'm really interested to pick your brain on what happens from your side when the media tells us there's a storm coming. What do you do on your end?

Michael: Well, we take an inventory of our teams, our local teams, our assets that might be around, whether that's working with the surgery division or our local offices and the surrounding offices. First, we focus on our office. We take an inventory of all the needed materials that a large storm will need. A lot of times, the utilities are down, stores are closed, everything's sold out. We try to get ahead of gathering tools and equipment that will be needed beforehand and prep ourselves for the event coming in front of us.

Doug: You have to prep regardless of what actually happens at the end. You could get all this preparation going. As we've seen off and on over the years, it doesn't become much of a storm. On the other hand, it could be a huge storm.

Michael: You're right. I think really the basic simple items, such as gassing up the vehicles, making sure that we have enough bar and chain oil, a couple extra chains, saws are tuned. Really, there's not a huge cost forward front of getting things together, but just making sure that we are ready for that storm if and when it does hit us in our local space.

Doug: For you and your team, when we know a storm is coming, is it like, "Oh gosh, we're going to be working day and night for the next who knows how long"?

Michael: Absolutely. I think that hits our teams, our sales teams, our field teams as well. It's really important to emphasize that we are first responders. We are first on the scene. We are the first ones to extract trees off of homes, patch homes to stop water penetration, any sort of elements getting in. We are first responders. We're emergency responders coming to the scene. They can't restore power. They can't get life back up and operating until we do our job.

Truthfully, it's a part of coming to the rescue for the community. Sure, there's extra hours, there's work, there's hard work at hand in front of us, but it's something we also have to mentally prep our teams for. A lot of long days, hard days. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have very short daylight hours in the winter. Winter storms can only give us potentially eight hours of actual daytime working time to operate during the light. We prep on all ends.

Doug: You had a bad storm there last January, right? How bad was it, and how did it affect your team?

Michael: It was about, they call it a 50-year, 100-year storm. It was massive in the scale and scope of what we typically see. We did a very large number of calls, so much that we couldn't get to everything. We actually had to mobilize teams from outside the state. We had our entire office working. I personally worked 40 days straight on that storm without a day off. Dedication to restore the community back to normal living, working conditions.

It was so widespread that we brought in teams from-- we had four guys come in from one of the Bay Area offices, four other come in from another Bay Area office. We had two guys come in from Denver offices. Then we also had two four-man teams, one from one of the Seattle offices and another four-man team come in from the other Seattle office.

They were with us the entire length of that trip, working dedicated hours. Some of the teams were working with headlamps and dedicated to putting some extra hours in after the daylight was short. Pretty much six, seven days a week. Everybody needs their time off and needs to recoup. Those are support for this last January storm.

Doug: What was the prediction for that storm? Did you know what you were in for, or did it turn into something even worse?

Michael: We knew that we were going to get hit very hard with this storm coming off the coast. The projections were showing it to land anywhere between Seattle and Eugene. That's a very large spot on the map. When it comes down to storms that happen two, three hours south of us where there are no offices, that's a little more difficult, a little bit more planning, a little bit more outside of our ZIP code, so to speak. It just so happened that it landed right in the heart of the city of Portland. It just happened to be in our neck of the woods directly.

Doug: Before a storm comes, because you're dealing with this all the time, do you have a standard, "Okay, we're going to do this, we're going to do that"? We talked earlier about the different things you want to do, gas up the vehicles and all that. Is that all ready to go when we know a storm's coming or even if we don't know one's coming?

Michael: Well, there's a little bit of a forecast for the general area and vicinity. We know that they're coming. We know there's potential high winds happening on an evening or something. Our sales management team and office staff will reach out and just convene. We know that calls can come in at 2:00 in the morning. We set ourselves up for those inevitables.

I know that we barely get sleep on those nights because we're always waking up, checking our phones, looking to see where we need to respond. What we do is we set ourselves up for success on that note. We will go on rotations as people need breaks. There's always somebody on call, somebody always answering the phone, somebody always answering their emails. We are on call until those calls start coming in.

Doug: Let's talk a little bit about what we can do as homeowners when we know a storm is on the way or even this time of the year. What can we do to get ready for a storm?

Michael: By the time we know that there's a storm approaching in the next 24 to 48 hours or even a week out, there's really not a lot that we can do as homeowners. You can call your local arborist and convene. If there is time available, you could meet with them. Quite honestly, a storm is a storm. It's very hard to come out and look at what appears to be a very healthy tree, and in an unnormal or a storm condition, that tree can uproot and come apart.

It's very hard to predict storm damage as it comes. Prevailing winds change, soil saturation. There's a lot of environmental situational items that really change the scope of what a normal storm is. What a normal day-to-day tree risk assessment really looks like. Last year's storm, what we had was a combination. We had very heavy saturating rains for weeks on end before. We had high winds happen, and then we had snow and ice happen, and then we had more high winds. There was multiple factors involved in why these trees were coming down all over the place.

Quite truthfully, it's not something that an arborist can really see in a healthy tree environment. If you are surrounded by trees, and you know that it's coming into your neighborhood, the storm's coming, best thing to do is essentially go visit some other family. Go get a hotel, go somewhere else. Power outages are going to happen. Prepare for the inevitable. That's the best heads-up I can give you for storm prepare.

Doug: That sounds good. On a bigger picture, this is why I think it's a good idea to have your arborist coming at a regular period so they can look for some problem areas, right?

Michael: We should be doing customer service visits annually, if not once, at least twice, just for a standard property evaluation so that we can put our eyes on all the things. It's free for us to do. Calling us out for appointments, free to get us on site, and what we are is consultants first, and the sales come second.

We're here to give you our professional opinions and put our eyes on things that homeowners may not look at, notice, or even see to evaluate. Some fungus coming out of the ground, out of the base of the tree, and it gives us indicators that a lot of homeowners may not see. Getting us on site, having us out there, I would almost say at least twice a year just to review the property, see things in an off-season and an on-season. The true evaluations are important.

Doug: I talk about this all the time on the podcast because I keep calling him my Davey arborist. The arborist who works for Davey, who takes care of my property, we always talk, when he comes out, and it is twice a year. He always finds things. I'm always bringing him out. I'm pointing out one problem, and he's observing that problem, coming up with a solution, but then he always, not always, but oftentimes can find another problem that I didn't even know anything about. If I wouldn't have had him out, I probably would not have my garage standing right now because he found a huge tree right behind my garage that was basically hollow, and I didn't know anything about it.

Michael: Absolutely. It's so important to have working professionals on site, and that happens all the time. There's a lot of time I go out, and you call me out for a said problem. I may find that that's actually not a problem. I think that you're okay. I think this is safe. The true tree risk assessment here doesn't show that it needs to be handled or managed. Save your money here, but ultimately, this is what I see coming down the future. Let's do a better assessment on this. Let's do a resistograph. Let's dive into this over here that I notice and may find other problems that you don't.

Doug: I want to talk a little bit about your journey into your job and what you get out of it. How has this become the right job for you?

Michael: Wow. I grew up in Northern Michigan, very small town. I loved being outside. This is before we really had internet. Everything was just getting into dial-up phase. I was a very outdoor enthusiast. I ended up in college down in Florida for marine biology and field ecology. I ended up in Atlanta after that, working for ArborGard. At the time, it was not a Davey company, but now it's been acquired by Davey. They were a phenomenal company to get me into the industry, very educational, straightforward, safety-oriented team, really taught me a lot from the ground up there.

From there, I relocated out to Seattle. This is where I actually officially started with Davey Tree in 2008 out of the single Seattle office, which was Bellevue, which was run by Rick Castro at the time, since retired. I was with them for three years. I then transferred over to the wheeling office in Chicago. I was with the wheeling office for about three and a half years in the wheeling space during the Teacot merge under John Drescher and Matt Hess at the time.

Then transferred back to my Seattle offices because they had done an expansion up there. I was with the Northwest Seattle office underneath Jay Maize for about eight years. Then I had the opportunity to come down and take on the Portland, Oregon project. I've been here since June of '22 in Portland.

The one thing I love about this job is that I don't have to be a used-car salesman. I get to be a very upfront and honest consultant. I really get to come to your property. I get to meet you. I love the customer relations that I get to build, the families that I get to know, the stories behind the families, where they've been, where they come from. I have great connections at every office with my clients everywhere that I've been.

I feel like I'm a people person. I'm an honest people person. This job has given me the ability to work outside and be a consultant first and a salesperson second and deliver quality, not quantity, to my customers. My customers, I treat just like they are family, just like they're my neighbors, like they're my aunts, my uncles, my parents. I give them the best advice possible for them to make the best decisions for their own properties and their investments that they're putting time and effort and money into all their lives.

Doug: Tell me a little bit about your season out there in Portland. Since I'm towards the East Coast, you're on the other coast. What's the season like, and what are some of the trees that are most popular out there?

Michael: Wow. We have some of the largest trees in the country. The West Coast is loaded with some very large trees. Impressively large. In fact, I had done a lot of climbing before I had moved out to the Pacific Northwest. When I got out here, I was relatively intimidated. Putting myself up 215 feet in a old-growth Douglas fir in the middle of the Cascades was an eye-opener. Pretty amazing to get into a living organism that's that large.

We have primarily conifers. We do have plenty of deciduous as well, but Douglas firs, hemlocks. We've got large-leaf maples out here. We've got a pretty wide variety of native trees. On personal properties, we have a lot of ornate non-native trees and shrubs that are brought in. Plant ID was probably-- I think that the Pacific Northwest is one of the best places to dial in a wide variety of Plant ID, simply because a lot of things we have are non-native and brought in. They're very Japanese in descent. It's a pretty amazing place to walk through a botanical garden here and just wrap your head around really all the stuff. [chuckles]

Doug: From that storm last January, were there lasting effects through the year for your season as far as tree health and such?

Michael: Really, what we had were opposing prevailing winds and trees that completely failed. What was really neat about seeing all these tree failures is seeing all of these root plates, looking underneath these massive root plates that stand 15 to 20 feet tall, and being able to essentially look into a cross-section, open up the body of this tree and see where they failed and why they failed. Looking for decay and rot, it really was more or less reassuring to see that these failed because of soil saturation, very heavy snow and ice loads, and then heavy winds.

It was reassuring to the customers, clients, myself, that there wasn't an internal damage. There's not massive rot going on, butt rot, anything like that, that's prevalent around here. We have really healthy trees. It just happened to be a matter of the direction of the wind and the severity of the weight loads and anything that made it through these storms.

We were also looking at very closely as well because it doesn't mean that they weren't compromised. It doesn't mean that the root system was hanging by a thread possibly of potential failure in the future. It's really given us a solid reason to put a lot of time and effort and really look at things a little bit deeper and put our eyes on all the properties that we see.

Doug: Well, Michael, I'm going to leave it right there for part one. Next week, I want to pick your brain about post-storm, what you guys go through and the different techniques that you use. I have to tell you, it's rare to talk to another redhead that has blue eyes because when I had hair, it was red. [chuckles] Let's catch up again next week and talk about post-storm things. All right?

Michael: All right. Yes, that sounds great. Thanks for having me on the podcast today. I look forward to speaking to you on part two.

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Doug: Be sure to listen next week for part two with Michael, because we know you tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees podcast from the Davey Tree Expert Company. I am your host, Doug Oster. Do me a big favor, subscribe to the podcast so you'll never miss an episode.

If you've got an idea for a show, maybe a comment, there's a couple different ways to reach us. Send us an email to podcasts@davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S@D-A-V-E-Y.com. You can also click the link at the end of our show notes to text us a fan mail message. Your ideas might be at a future podcast. We'd love to hear from you. As always, we like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast, trees are the answer.

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