Etna is the borough our trucks sleep in

A borough built between the water and the hill

Etna is roughly a mile square with Pine Creek coming down the middle of it and the Allegheny waiting at the bottom, and every tree question here traces back to that geography. The flat part of the borough is old mill ground: rowhouses and worker cottages shoulder to shoulder, yards you can pace off in a dozen steps, and in the middle of a good number of those yards a silver maple somebody planted eighty years ago that has since outgrown the entire property. The hillside streets climbing away behind the flats are the opposite problem, with wooded slope pressing right up against the back fences.

The creek corridor is where the interesting failures live. Trees along Pine Creek grow in soil that spends part of every year holding water, so they build wide shallow root plates instead of deep ones, which works fine until a saturated spring lines up with a hard gust. Then the whole plate lifts and a tree that looked perfectly healthy in June lies across a yard in one piece. The tell is at the base rather than in the canopy: soil cracked open on the uphill side, a hump of turf on the other, or a trunk sitting a few degrees off its old angle. A leaner on a creek bank almost never straightens itself out, and the ones we get to before a front are far cheaper and far tidier than the ones we get to after.

Everybody who has lived in this borough long enough measures water in relation to Ivan. That September in 2004 rewrote what people here consider possible, and it changed how the borough thinks about drainage permanently. Etna has spent the years since putting real money into green stormwater work, rain gardens and basins and planted infrastructure meant to slow water down before it reaches the creek. We take that seriously on the job. Our machines stay off the soft engineered ground, we plan the drop zone around anything planted for drainage rather than through it, and if getting to a tree means crossing something that was built to soak up water, we would rather rig the tree out over the roof than leave ruts in work the borough paid for.

The tight lots change how a takedown actually happens. On a flat suburban acre a tree can be dropped whole and cut up on the ground. Almost nothing in Etna’s flats works that way. Between a rowhouse on one side, a garage on the other, a power drop overhead and a neighbor’s fence six feet from the trunk, the tree leaves in rope-lowered pieces, one at a time, controlled all the way down. That is slower and it takes a climber who knows what he is doing, and it is why the borough’s small yards are some of our most-practiced work rather than our most-avoided.

The hillsides behind the streets bring the third kind of call. Steep wooded ground above a back lot fills in with volunteer growth, knotweed, wild grape and locust choking the slope until nobody can see what is actually standing back there, and then a dead ash lets go and lands in somebody’s yard. Clearing that brush back is honest maintenance work that also lets you finally see the trees that matter. When one of them has already come down across a fence at two in the morning, that becomes an emergency call instead, and being fifteen minutes away means something at that hour.

Every job ends the same regardless of which Etna you live in. The grinder takes the stump below grade before the truck leaves, the chips get raked out of the grass, and the alley looks like nobody was in it. We run this same standard across Allegheny County, but the borough where our mail lands is the one where a sloppy finish would follow us to the grocery store.