Emsworth grows bigger trees than its lots can hold

A borough with two kinds of tree trouble

Down by the locks and dam, the flat streets sit on river bottom soil that holds water all season. Sycamore and cottonwood love it. They put on height fast, throw out heavy horizontal limbs, and reach a size that would take a hillside tree three times as long to hit. The trouble is that fast wood is weak wood. A cottonwood that shot up over a 40 foot lot has brittle unions and a habit of dropping a limb the width of your leg on a still August afternoon, no storm required. Half our calls down here are people who watched exactly that happen and want the rest of the tree looked at before it happens again over the car.

Then there is the mess factor. Sycamores shed bark in sheets, cottonwoods drop cotton and twigs and then a second wave of leaves, and both do it on a scale nobody sees coming until they are hauling their sixth tarp load to the curb. Some of those trees deserve to stay and just need weight pulled off the long limbs. Others have outgrown a lot they never should have been planted on, and that becomes large tree removal work with rigging, because there is nowhere for anything to simply fall.

Climb toward Ben Avon Heights and the problem flips. Trees on a slope grow with a lean built into them from the first year, and a lean over a detached garage or a shared driveway is a completely different job than a lean over open lawn. Root plates on those hillside lots sit in thin soil over shale, so there is less anchorage to begin with, and a wet spring followed by a hard west wind is all it takes to start a tree moving. We check the uphill side of the trunk for cracked or heaved soil before we put a number on anything growing on a slope, because that one detail separates a healthy leaner that can be pruned from a tree that has already begun to go and needs to come out this month.

The garages are what make hillside work in this borough its own category. Emsworth houses were built close together on narrow lots, and the garage usually sits at the bottom of the slope with the tree directly above it. There is no drop zone. Everything comes down on rope, piece by piece, lowered instead of dropped, with a groundman controlling the descent so nothing touches the roof below. Add a fence line and the neighbor’s parked car on the other side and you have the standard Emsworth removal. It is slower work than an open lot and it is the reason Chris walks the property before quoting rather than pricing anything off a photo of the crown alone.

Seasons here run on the river’s schedule. Spring high water keeps the bottomland soft well into May, so that is when we see the most root failures on the flat streets. Midsummer brings the quiet limb drops that catch people off guard, usually cottonwood, usually on a windless day, usually the limb nobody was worried about. Fall is the sensible time to get ahead of it, when the leaves are off and we can actually read structure in a canopy. Winter belongs to wet snow and ice, which loads long horizontal limbs faster than anything else and finds every weak union a fast growing river tree ever made.

Access is its own puzzle in Emsworth. Route 65 runs the length of the borough and the rail line runs beside it, so a street side drop that would be routine anywhere else has to be timed, coned and worked in short controlled sections. Our crews plan the wood path before the first cut: where the truck parks, where the chipper feeds, which limb comes off first so nothing swings toward traffic. It is slower, it is the only responsible way to do it, and it is the same standard we hold across Allegheny County. When a front comes through the river valley and takes limbs down overnight, storm damage cleanup gets the same treatment on a much shorter clock.