It was the worst storm of the year so far, the worst in several years in fact. Stanley Park was closed, the PNE was evacuated, and the ferry service suspended. The windstorm of Saturday, Aug. 28, 2015, brought unseasonably crazy weather down upon us, blasting us with gusts up to 80 km/h, knocking out power to an estimated 700,000 homes, and sending roughly 500 trees crashing to the ground. That’s a brutal statistic for a city that is trying to increase its tree canopy, not reduce it.
So what happened to all those fallen trees? The clean-up has taken a long time. So long, that branches and tree trunks are still strewn along sidewalks and gutters in my East Vancouver neighbourhood. I get it, there’s a lot of debris to get to, and I live on a side street, so I’m not complaining. But when an email came through from my local community association about recycling the fallen trees, I perked up. According to the notice, the City was transferring limbs, branches and trunk pieces from the towering silver maple trees that came down in East Vancouver, to nearby parks for neighbours to salvage as firewood.
I’m lucky to live in a house that still has a wood-burning fireplace, so I was totally into the idea. Don’t get me wrong, my first choice would always be that those trees remained standing, but now that they’re down and need to be removed, why not give the wood a second use?
I had been eyeing some nice, thick branches piled up in the park for a few weeks. I could imagine the comforting aroma of autumn wood smoke the logs would produce once dried out and crackling in our fireplace. This past weekend, I found some time to pull out my bright orange hard hat, gloves, steel-toed boots, safety glasses and, yes, my chainsaw. That’s right, I own an actual chainsaw (it was a wedding gift). Since owning a chainsaw, I’ve discovered that they are extremely loud, incredibly powerful, and downright furious machines that can take off a limb, whether on a tree or your body, in an instant. That’s why I wear all the gear. My wife hates the thing.
Revving up my chainsaw, I was suddenly the most popular guy on the block. My neighbours heard the screaming saw and rushed over, asking me to slice down and saw up hanging branches and fallen trees in their own yards. I obliged.
When I finally got to the park to buck up that perfect log I had been eyeing, I was stunned to find nothing but a pile of sawdust. Could it be? Could another neighbour with their own chainsaw have beaten me to it? There were a few odds and ends left, so I fired up my saw and got to work. A few minutes later I sensed I was being watched. A man was standing there, gripping a chainsaw. He gave just me a bit of the stink eye. Did he have a claim on this tree? Were we to have an East Van chainsaw fight? Luckily for the both of us, he moved on to another log.
Thanks to whirring saws like ours, most of the storm wood is gone now. But if you’re in the market for some of the fallen 500, large loads of logs were hauled to the Spanish Banks woodlot – just west of the Jericho Sailing Club – and is free for the taking. Word to the wise: chainsaws at the woodlot aren’t allowed.
And so, it may have been a horrible storm, but its fallen bounty filled my woodshed to the brim, and I managed to get through it all with my limbs still attached.
