Ash Tree Deaths
Note:
My work was recognized as important and was featured in an article published in the Lansing State Journal on November 9, 2018.
The issue was also published in Michigan Farmer and Ohio Farmer magazines in December 2018.
https://www.michiganfarmer.com/land-management/dead-ash-trees-are-killing-people-don-t-be-negligent
NPR (National Public Radio) aired this interview with me on January 15, 2019 on the Michigan Stateside program. You can listen to the entire broadcast (my interview is at the end) here; My interview starts at 38:28.
https://cpa.ds.npr.org/michigan/audio/2019/01/20190115_SS_Full_Show_Tue.mp3
Alternatively, you can listen to my interview directly here.
This site focuses on the ASH TREE calamity.
Working to spread knowledge and get the trees removed is everyone's responsibility!
There are more deaths caused by all other species of trees combined falling directly on moving vehicles, but I fear that may change in the next year or so. If you want to see HUNDREDS of photos of cars crushed by all types of trees, just Google search "driver" "tree fell" and click Images under the search bar. The quotes force the word to be in the search results.
The emerald ash borer beetle is dangerous to more than just ash trees. They killed EVERY ONE of hundreds of ash trees on my property and have spread from the Detroit harbor where they originated in the US to Colorado and the Atlantic Ocean. Dead ash trees are killing people as they fall onto our nation's highways. I find more every time I search. The danger is at an all time high right now because the trees have been dead long enough that they are falling.
Above is a clip from my Google Earth overlay, downloadable at the bottom of this page. The yellow pins are locations of accidents caused by falling ash trees. You can zoom in on Cass County Michigan and see all the dead roadside ash trees I have marked if you load the overlay into Google Earth. Identification of dead ash from satellite photos has proven over 90% accurate.
Watch this phenomenal 18 second video!
Click the link below and click the video. Click the full screen option immediately and watch the dead ash tree fall on the car driving by. You will want to watch this one again. The parking lot security camera was pointed dead center at a large dead ash tree across the road that should have been removed long ago. If this driver had been two feet farther along her path, she would have been killed. I estimate traffic was moving at about 40 Mph. My calculator says it only takes .033 seconds to travel two feet at that speed, so it really comes down to split second timing that saves you or kills you when this happens.
https://www.wmur.com/article/tree-falls-on-car-driving-in-hudson/23091960
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DEATHS by Ash Tree
15 found so far
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1. https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2016/01/police_identify_driver_killed.html
It doesn't take a very big tree to kill you when it impacts you directly in the head. The tree is classic dead ash.
Click any photo to enlarge
The excellent photos in the link above make it easy to exactly pinpoint this accident. The Google street view on the left shows the orange sign and railroad crossing in the distance that can be seen in the accident photos. The dead ash is standing, towering to the top of the photo in this Sept. 2015 shot. The Google Earth aerial photo on the right dated 7/5/15 shows the creek guardrails shown in the accident photos. The dead ash is at the yellow pin. 27 year old Rory McDonald was killed by this relatively small tree on January 10th, 2016 near Lapeer, Michigan.
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2. https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2016/03/16/gary-cox-driver-killed-tree/81884676/
Gary Cox was killed by a huge dead ash tree on3/16/2016 near Howell, MI.
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3. https://www.abc57.com/news/falling-tree-hits-moving-vehicle-killing-16-year-old-boy
9/15/2015 aerial photo from Google Earth shows circled dead ash just South of Harvey St. in Cass County, Michigan. It no longer shows on the 4/27/17 set of phtos because it fell on the truck above on 1/4/2017. The large, orange circle at the bottom has a memorial erected at the stump. This tree had been dead plenty long enough to have been discovered and removed. Had it been removed, 16 year old Nicholas Hewitt would still be alive. The orange circle at the top is an ash tree that fell 9/21/2018 and narrowly missed a school bus. The purple circles are still standing, very dangerous dead ash.
This memorial to Nick Hewitt was erected at the site of the crash. If you zoom in on the photo you can see holes in the tree stumps made by the ash borer.
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4. https://www.woodtv.com/news/kent-county/man-killed-after-tree-falls-on-suv-in-kent-
Dead tree pushed to the side of the road in photo is a white ash, easily identifiable to someone like me who has cut hundreds of dead green and white ash from my property. Judging from photos in other articles about this incident, this stretch of Grand River Road in Kent County, Michigan is a current death trap. Had it been properly maintained by removal of the dangerous dead trees, 90 year old Howard Thumser might still be alive. Date of death 5/1/2018.
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5. http://www.ogemawherald.com/stories/hale-man-killed-when-tree-falls-on-car,107059
Posted Monday, May 28, 2018 12:31 pm
RICHLAND TWP. — A Hale man was killed instantly when a tree fell on the vehicle he was driving according to the Ogemaw County Sheriff’s Office.
Ogemaw County Sheriff Howie Hanft said 68-year-old Frederick Green of Hale was driving with his 59-year-old wife on Sage Lake Road in Richland Township at around 3:30 p.m. May 27 when a tree fell on their vehicle.
The Google Earth photo below is where Frederick Green was driving slowly on Sunday, May 27 2018 just North of Prescott Michigan when he was killed by a tree falling on his car. Can you see all the dead ash trees? What a death trap! I couldn't find a photo of the wrecked vehicle, but this photo makes it clear what happened. Wind will blow these trees down much more readily than it will a healthy tree. This Google Earth photo was taken on 6/10/2018, just two weeks after the accident. It's almost like they were looking at this area.
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60 year old Robert Musch was killed on 7/6/2018 when a dead green ash fell on his truck. These photos were clipped from the video in the link. If you go to the bridge across the river at Front & 2nd in Cuyahoga Falls, OH and go to Google Maps street view and go North, you can see several dead ash trees along the road near the entrance to the Gorge Metro Park. They are not very big, but as this accident shows, it doesn't take a very big one to kill you. Had it been a big one, the whole cab on the truck would have been crushed like in some of the other accidents on this page.
Check out the leaning dead ash tree in the photo below (click to enlarge). This is exactly where Robert was killed, and there is another dangerous tree right there. It fell into an adjacent tree and hung up. A windstorm might be all it takes to drop it onto a passing vehicle.
A follow up with park personnel revealed that this tree was removed after the accident.
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7. http://www.cleveland19.com/story/36065746/ohio-woman-dies-after-a-tree-falls-on-suv-during-storm
28 year old Devon Cook, mother of two small children, was killed by a falling dead green ash in Montville county, Ohio on 8/4/2017. I clipped the photo of the dead tree from a video taken at the scene. It is an obvious dead ash. Negligence is the direct cause of this woman's death, which could have been prevented had the property owner or the road commission, whichever is responsible in Ohio, removed the tree.
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8. http://www.wbiw.com/local/archive/2017/11/bedford-man-killed-after-tree-falls-on-semi.php
It is difficult to say from this photo if the tree is an ash tree, but other articles on this incident say that there was no wind at the time, which makes it more likely that it was a dead ash. Even Semi drivers are at risk as this photo of an accident near Shoals, Indiana shows. The driver, 33 year old Eric Gootee, died here on 8/8/2017.
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Sad, sad, sad. This is the first article I have found that clearly states it was a dead ash tree. The worst part is the road commission had been notified about the dangerous tree and had not taken it down. I have found out that road commissions CAN take down a tree in the right-of-way without landowner permission if it is a safety issue, but they don't have to. The courts in Michigan have ruled that the road commission is not liable for these dead trees. The property owner is. Michelle Martin died in this accident on 10/22/2018 in Caledonia, Wisconsin.
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I couldn't find a photo of the wrecked vehicle, but the tree that hit and killed Jerry McWhorter was a dead ash. He was killed on Highway 48 on 9/27/18 near Charlotte, TN. Google Earth photos of that area show dead ash trees in 2015 and before.
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It took two hours of comparing photos in the website above to google maps street views and Google Earth photos to pinpoint the location of the emergency vehicles in the above left photo. Once I had the exact location of the accident, it was a simple matter to find the tree. It is a dead ash in front of the building in the right photo. I had to go back to the 10/10/2016 set of Google Earth photos to see the tree. It was not there in subsequent Google Earth photo sets because it fell on 40 year old James Marcelynas'
truck on March 2nd, 2017 in Columbia, Connecticut, and killed him.
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12. https://wtov9.com/news/local/ohio-county-man-killed-in-pennsylvania-crash
Scott W. Miller, age 36, was killed 6/22/2017 in the 500 block of Ridge Road South of Jefferson, PA. The Google Earth photo from 10/5/2016 clearly shows a large, dead ash tree at that location. I'm betting that is the tree that got him.
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57 year old Alameda Couture was killed on April 23rd, 2015 on Tontagany Creek road just North of Tontogany, OH. Google Earth shows a number of dead ash trees at the site of the accident on the 5/29/14 set of photos. The 10/10/2015 set shows even more.
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50 year old Paul Agbo died when this tree fell on his moving car on March 2nd, 2018 in Washington DC. The last photo shows the classic shattering of a dead ash killed by the ash borer when it hits the ground. Google Earth shows the tree located near 2500 44th St. NW dead on the 10/7/2014 and 4/14/2016 photo sets. The tree had been dead plenty long enough so that park personnel had to have known about it. Why didn't they remove it? Paul Agbo would still be alive if they had maintained the park for the safety of people on the streets. Interestingly, you can see numerous dead ash in the park in the 10/7/2014 photo set but NONE in the 6/13/2018 set. Could it be they got the message after Paul was killed?
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15. https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Man-Dies-Days-After-Tree-Falls-on-Van--90384649.html
33 year old Jerzy Szczepanek was fatally injured on 4/7/2010 when a dead tree fell on the van he was driving. The Google Earth photo below from 5/22/2016 of the location shows Chicago's Schiller Woods is riddled with dead ash trees, many along the roadway. Click on the photo to enlarge it and you can see the dead trees.
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How You Can Help
If you know of an instance of someone crashing because of a dead ash tree, please let me know at LRGoodger *at* gmail *dot* com and I will add the information to this site. We need to send a message to our legislators nationwide that losing even one life to a dead ash tree is too much. Stiff penalties need to be imposed upon landowners or road commissions responsible for and negligent in removing these trees.
As a result of this information, uncovered after my wife's accident, I used Google Earth and visual confirmation to identify over 1100 dead roadside trees in Cass County, Michigan. You can see them by loading the file at the bottom of this page (DeadAsh.kmz) into Google Earth. Click the down arrow to the right of the file name to download it and save it to your computer. Then in Google Earth, go to the FILE tab and select OPEN and pick the DeadAsh.kmz file you just saved and zoom in on Cass County, MI.
At high altitude the circled trees appear as crosses. Zooming in on one clearly shows a dead tree within the circle. I marked only the larger ones close enough to the road to fall on it. There are millions of dead ash in forests in Cass County alone. and hundreds of them are roadside trees.
In Google Earth, go to the VIEW tab and check the Historical Imagery box. That puts a slide bar on the map that lets you select the date of photos you want to see. Sets of photos taken when there are few leaves on the trees, such as the 4/23/2017 set in Cass County, are helpful only to confirm that a dead ash is still there at that time. Sliding back to the 9/15/2015 set of maps allows one to see the dead ash among the other trees quite clearly. Resolution is good enough to see dead ash on map sets all the way back to 10/4/2011 in parts of the county.
1. Purple circles indicate a dead tree confirmed dangerous and still standing as of 12/13/2018.
2. Thick Purple circles that look like crosses at high altitude are very large dangerous trees.
3. Red circles indicate a dead tree that is potentially dangerous, but I have not visually confirmed it.
4. Yellow circles indicate dangerous dead trees that were removed by responsible landowners.
If you know someone who owns property that has a dead roadside tree on it, be sure to tell them that they can be sued for damages in Michigan and many other states (in Virginia it is the road commission's responsibility) if the tree falls into the road and causes damage to someone else's property (their vehicle) or kills someone.
If a healthy tree or a tree that looks healthy (i.e., you can't tell it is dead by looking at it) falls into the roadway, usually because of a windstorm, then it is an act of God and no one can be sued. If, however, the tree is obviously dead, then the responsible party (the landowner in Michigan) has a duty to travelers to remove the danger. A dead tree can fall at any time, but they are more likely to fall during a windstorm just as live trees are.