Seventeen hours. That's how long the freezing rain fell on March 3rd and 4th, 1991, before it finally quit. By the time it did, more than 10,000 trees inside the City of Rochester were gone, 750,000 people had no power — some of them for over a week — and the damage bill ran to about $170 million, only $75 million of which was insured.
People here still bring it up every March. They should. That storm sorted the local tree population with a thoroughness no arborist could match.
The storm picked winners and losers by species
Silver maple took the worst of it. Block after block of split trunks and torn crotches, mostly silver maple. It's a fast grower with brittle wood and V-shaped branch unions that were never built to hold a quarter inch of ice, let alone a full glaze.
Green ash was the other casualty. The city lost 51% of its ash population in that one event. What's darkly funny, in hindsight, is that the ash that survived 1991 mostly didn't survive what came next. Emerald ash borer turned up at Upper Falls Park on St. Paul Street in June 2011, after a Scottsville find the year before, and Monroe County has some of the highest ash density in the state. The city treats roughly 3,604 ash in rights-of-way and parks with TREE-age. Everything else is on its own.
The part that actually matters for your yard: well-maintained, structurally sound trees came through 1991 far better than neglected ones. Same species, same street, same ice. Different outcome, decided years earlier by whether anybody had ever pruned the thing properly.
What's still standing over your roof
Maples are more than half the street trees around here — Norway, silver, sugar, red. Walk Park Avenue or Corn Hill and you're under a canopy that's largely one genus, planted close to houses on lots never sized for what those trees became.
- Silver maple — weak unions, brittle wood, the single most failure-prone tree in the region under ice, wind or heavy snow. Needs the most attention and gets the least.
- Green ash — untreated, it's dying or dead. Dead ash goes brittle fast and fails unpredictably, which is why we hate seeing homeowners on a ladder under one with a chainsaw.
- Callery pear — gorgeous in April, splits down the middle by 20 years old. Weak branch unions, same story as silver maple in a smaller package.
- Norway maple — holds ice better than its cousins, but girdling roots strangle it from below and you don't see it coming.
- Red oak, honeylocust, littleleaf linden, London planetree — sturdier, but any of them will drop a limb if there's decay in it.
And it doesn't take a 1991-scale event. Lake Ontario snow is wet and dense, so a nothing-special squall off the lake loads branches harder than the inch total suggests. We get December calls for failures people assume needed a real storm.
The fall walk-around
Do this in October, before the ground freezes and before anything is loaded. You're not diagnosing — you're just noticing.
- Tight V-shaped unions where two big stems meet, especially with bark pinched in between. That's the seam things tear along.
- Any limb over the roof, the driveway, or the neighbor's fence — is it dead? Bare in July is your answer.
- Mushrooms or conks at the base, soft spots, old flush cuts that never sealed.
- Frost cracks and storm wounds the spring thaw exposed and you meant to deal with.
- Ash: thinning from the top down, D-shaped exit holes, woodpecker damage stripping bark. That tree is on a clock.
Structural pruning — reducing an overextended limb, cutting out a competing leader while it's still small — is cheap compared to what happens when that limb comes off on its own and takes gutter, siding and a service drop with it. Removal here runs roughly $400 to $2,500 depending on size and access, more for anything 80 feet and hazardous. Grinding the stump on the same visit costs less than bringing the machine back later.
Check your own town's rules, not your neighbor's
This trips people up constantly because we work across a lot of jurisdictions. In the City of Rochester, removing a private tree 6 inches or more in diameter generally needs a permit and a $90 fee — but owner-occupants of a one-family parcel under an acre are exempt, as are dead, diseased, damaged or hazard trees. Those exemptions don't cover landmark trees or anything in the tree lawn. Street trees belong to the Forestry Division (585-428-7581), and no, you can't take one down yourself.
Cross into Brighton and it's a different rulebook: Chapter 175 plus the Woodlot Protection District, permits on parcels over an acre, a development permit for anything over 5 inches inside the EPOD. Out in Brockport the village only regulates public, right-of-way, park and easement trees. Canandaigua is the same today, though their Tree Advisory Board has floated a notification ordinance for private removals. Livingston County towns like Avon have their own answers again.
One more on ash: Monroe County sits inside New York's EAB Restricted Zone, so untreated ash wood can't leave it. If you were planning to haul rounds up to a camp somewhere, don't.
If there's a silver maple leaning over your bedroom and you've never had anyone look at it, that's the one to deal with this fall. Send us the address or start on the main page — we'd rather look at it in October than cut it off your roof in February.