Is the Air Spade the solution to home-builders' damage to tree roots in my community?

[arathol]

How costly and how time-consuming would it be to Air Spade all around the sides and back of where a new home's foundation will be built, on terrain sloping fairly steeply either up or down from the street, in either medium-textured or clay soil? The trench should be sufficient to reveal the tree roots extending into the proposed excavation area from the adjacent forested areas, so that good decisions can be made about the trees.

This is in the Pacific Northwest. The trees of concern are mainly Douglas fir, Western redcedar, and bigleaf maple. I believe the evergreens, at least, are known to have wide-spreading shallow root systems. Not sure about the maples.

This community is an HOA, so has the legal power to enforce whatever good building practices it chooses.

HOA decisions and good practices are not always the same.....especially when money is involved. I don't think that the HOA has the power to over ride local building codes though....when the building commences, take lots of pictures of every phase for future reference just in case.......

 

[sean donato]

Seems like a witch hunt here. If you truly had an issue there would be overwhelming support of said issue. Not a sample rate of one. That's just bad practices. It sounds as though you need to higher someone to come out and see if there truly is an issue.

 

[Karen2]

Hi, TNTreeHugger, the tree that fell on the new deck did so in 2020, and was located on that homeowner's lot, not on Association land. I feel pretty sure there is no record of the event in the Association's documents. Sudden Valley doesn't keep track of tree problems that occur on people's lots. I only happened to find out about the deck-killer tree because the homeowner talked about it when I visited in response to his ACC request. I don't know how many other similar things have happened. Someone else I know had her large cedar tree evaluated by an arborist after noticing ripped roots during excavation next door, and had the tree taken down on the arborist's recommendation.

Sudden Valley probably should never have been allowed to come into being. The developer took steep hills covered in Pacific Northwest forest and divided the land into thousands of small lots and sold them to people as vacation-home lots. Only relatively few lots, scattered around the community, are built on at any one time. The good thing about that is the stormwater impacts are a lot lower than if everything were built out at once. The bad thing is, person 1 builds a nice vacation home in 1975 and lets the trees grow big on his lot. Then decades later person 2 builds a big home on the lot next door and his excavation wreaks havoc on the roots of person 1's trees.

Most often person 1 knows nothing about tree roots and isn't there watching during the excavation, so when the trees start to ail a couple of years later he doesn't connect the dots. It's only when the damage is so extreme that the tree can't even stay upright through the first strong wind that the tree's owner knows who to blame.

 

[pdqdl]

Critical root zone specifications can be done with math, no need for an air spade. Species, DBH, and height will determine how much space any particular trees root zone will require.
You would be better served to hire a consulting arborist who has some back round in establishing critical root zone specifications in construction sites.
Once specifications are established make sure there is a PHYSICAL barrier limiting construction equipment into the area specified. They will not respect some paint on the ground in most cases.

 

[GeeVee]

The community maintains its own roads and system of ditches and culverts, and knows relatively little about that system's capacity and weak spots.

You mention damage to existing trees from changed drainage patterns. I have been wondering about that for some time. Tracking down the reasons for a suddenly-soggy yard is beyond the ability of most ordinary homeowners once a leaky water line is eliminated from contention, and nobody in the HOA management has been attempting anything like that. There is anecdotal evidence on Nextdoor that some wooded areas have become soggy that were not soggy a few years ago, with the poster blaming new construction that happened on a lot uphill from there, but who knows.

You needed a better company. Not knowing which lots were owned by who? They don't know how to hire a surveyor, or your HOA didn't pay them to hire one or provide information?

The Forest Management Plan (https://suddenvalley.com/wp-content/uploads/SVCA-Forest-Management-Plan-2015.pdf) was supposed to evaluate only community-owned trees. The report writers said they did their best but had a lot of trouble figuring out which trees WERE community-owned and which were not. There are mostly-narrow greenbelts separating rows of lots throughout, plus a significant number of lots scattered around the community have been repurchased by the HOA (mostly during a 1990s sewer moratorium) and placed into open space.

 

[Karen2]

The community maintains its own roads and system of ditches and culverts, and knows relatively little about that system's capacity and weak spots.

You mention damage to existing trees from changed drainage patterns. I have been wondering about that for some time. Tracking down the reasons for a suddenly-soggy yard is beyond the ability of most ordinary homeowners once a leaky water line is eliminated from contention, and nobody in the HOA management has been attempting anything like that. There is anecdotal evidence on Nextdoor that some wooded areas have become soggy that were not soggy a few years ago, with the poster blaming new construction that happened on a lot uphill from there, but who knows.

You needed a better company. Not knowing which lots were owned by who? They don't know how to hire a surveyor, or your HOA didn't pay them to hire one or provide information?

The Forest Management Plan (https://suddenvalley.com/wp-content/uploads/SVCA-Forest-Management-Plan-2015.pdf) was supposed to evaluate only community-owned trees. The report writers said they did their best but had a lot of trouble figuring out which trees WERE community-owned and which were not. There are mostly-narrow greenbelts separating rows of lots throughout, plus a significant number of lots scattered around the community have been repurchased by the HOA (mostly during a 1990s sewer moratorium) and placed into open space.

Hi GeeVee, the HOA didn't pay them to hire a surveyor. Would have been a Herculean task to place all the pins needed to identify where all the greenbelts end and the lots begin. Don't forget, we originally had something like 4500 lots, now down to 3100 member-owned lots (some were combined, others bought by the HOA and put into the County's zero-tax open space program).

 

[Karen2]

Hi karen2,
I pulled it up on google and it's a beautiful area. But, looking at a lot map on that document I found makes me agree with you - it never should have been developed.... at least not with so many lots crammed so close together.

Have you made any progress on your project since you posted last Aug? Did you try the air spade?
I'm far from an expert but from what I've gathered from others posts here, seems to me it should be pretty simple to evaluate the risk of tree failure by looking at the slope of the land and the height of the tree to determine root spread. If excavation would sever stabilizing roots, either the tree needs to go, or don't build the house.
Maybe that should be determined Before the lot is sold?

Hi TNTreeHugger,

I found a local certified arborist who has an AirSpade and asked him about my idea, but he wasn’t encouraging about it. Said he uses it mainly for utility installation through root zones of valuable trees. The customer is generally a utility company or local government.

I got the distinct impression he was not enthusiastic about routinely AirSpade trenching significant lengths on Sudden Valley lots. I guess the AirSpade throws a lot of mud all over and the user gets covered in mud. Probably also not easy to move around on steep irregular terrain with the heavy hose dragging behind you. And the compressor must make a lot of noise so you’d get neighbors complaining.

We on the Committee did start asking builders to contact the neighbors and offer to include certain of the neighbors' trees in their lot clearing work, which they were surprisingly willing to do. I guess it doesn't cost them that much more to add a tree, even a big one, and maybe they get money for the lumber too. I've seen a tree crew at work clearing a lot, and they are amazing. Really fast and efficient.

Maybe I shouldn't have, but I quit the Committee. I found out that our Committee has a lot less power than I thought, thanks both to lack of support from the HOA’s Board of Directors (no enforcement beyond new-home minimum setbacks and maximum height and footprint, intense pressure to reverse adverse decisions when a lawsuit is threatened) and a court case I didn’t know about before (Mt. Park Homeowners Ass’n, Inc. v. Tydings) that makes it extremely difficult for HOAs in my state to regain control after losing it.

 

[GeeVee]

Hi GeeVee, the HOA didn't pay them to hire a surveyor. Would have been a Herculean task to place all the pins needed to identify where all the greenbelts end and the lots begin. Don't forget, we originally had something like 4500 lots, now down to 3100 member-owned lots (some were combined, others bought by the HOA and put into the County's zero-tax open space program).

The community maintains its own roads and system of ditches and culverts, and knows relatively little about that system's capacity and weak spots.

I believe you said you were a civil engineer? How exactly is anyone going to get a handle on drainage, or trees, or anything else, when you dont know what you own, and someone else owns? Meets and bounds, topo.

Why would you want to remain in an HOA, thats flying blind? And apparently unwilling to find the right way to do things? Typical. HOA's are worthless. I used to deal with HOA''s and COA's, when they came to me, and only and strictly on my terms. As soon as I had a chance to tell the "board" why I was unwilling to accept their terms and remind them they came to me, they remembered that, and understood- there was no arguing what I told them and why I wasn't doing business with them on the terms they were expecting me to accept.

 

[Karen2]

The community maintains its own roads and system of ditches and culverts, and knows relatively little about that system's capacity and weak spots.

I believe you said you were a civil engineer? How exactly is anyone going to get a handle on drainage, or trees, or anything else, when you dont know what you own, and someone else owns? Meets and bounds, topo.

The boundary locations don't affect drainage-system design because the system has to drain all the water no matter whose property it originally fell on. As for tree maintenance, I know when an owner wants to remove a tree that's questionable whether it belongs to him, he is supposed to pay for the surveying himself. But how the arborist the Association contracted with 2 years ago for hazard tree identification and removal knew which trees were Association owned, I don't know. I think there have been advancements in GPS surveying technology that might bypass the need for pins in the ground, at least for things like tree location that might not need to be super-precise.

Why would you want to remain in an HOA, thats flying blind? And apparently unwilling to find the right way to do things?

I look out at lovely Lake Whatcom and thank my lucky stars that I can pull my kayak off the waterside rack spot I rent from the Association anytime I want and be out there paddling in no time at all!

Typical. HOA's are worthless. I used to deal with HOA''s and COA's, when they came to me, and only and strictly on my terms. As soon as I had a chance to tell the "board" why I was unwilling to accept their terms and remind them they came to me, they remembered that, and understood- there was no arguing what I told them and why I wasn't doing business with them on the terms they were expecting me to accept.

Yeah, too often people in HOAs don't think about the fact that the shared infrastructure costs money to maintain, and resent every penny spent. They're not happy when problems happen either, but somehow it's always the Board's fault, never their fault for fighting dues increases tooth and nail. Sigh. I also know the realtors lie to home shoppers, telling them what they want to hear, and definitely do not bring up such details as the fact that this HOA maintains its own roads and will forever be stuck with that.