The ice is gone, but Windsor-Essex trees will spend months recovering from last week's storm

Sap slowly dripping out from a tree's severed limb at Holiday Beach Conservation Area is one of many signs of injury to Windsor-Essex's green space following last week's ice storm. 

Though the ice from one of the region's worst storms has melted, dozens of tree limbs still litter front yards and parks across the region. 

Last Wednesday, freezing rain accumulation weighed down trees, causing limbs to snap and cutting power to thousands across Windsor-Essex. Seven days after the uncommon weather event, tree limbs are still being cleared across a region that is known to have relatively low tree coverage to begin with.

The Essex Region Conservation Authority (ERCA) is out this week, specifically taking care of the trees at Holiday Beach. 

Despite the severity of the storm, after assessing the trees in the area ERCA's forester Paul Giroux said it wasn't "catastrophic." 

"It was definitely a bad storm, I think other areas of the county might have been hit worse ... but I don't think it's quite as bad as maybe I was expecting," he said. 

"Yes, there's lots of work to be done, there's lots of limbs down, but a lot of the limbs are not too big."

Giroux said it's hard to know for certain how many trees the storm impacted across Windsor-Essex, but he doesn't think the region's tree coverage was significantly lowered because of it. 

Anecdotally, he's heard the southern shore, where Amherstburg and Leamington are, might have been hit worse than the northern side of the region. He said non-native tree species, like certain poplars and willows, are weak-wooded and seem to have sustained worse injuries versus stronger wooded trees like oak and hickory. 

As of 2019, the City of Windsor's tree canopy was at 19 per cent. To help increase this, the city has spent millions since 2020, which has doubled the number of large trees planted to 2,000.

The City of Windsor said it received more than 1,000 calls for service regarding trees with broken or fallen limbs, but it doesn't know exactly how many trees this translates into. 

About half of these calls were emergency situations, said the city's forester Yemi Adeyeye. 

"We've covered a lot of the emergencies and a lot of the urgent, so right now every part of the city should be safe," Adeyeye told CBC Radio's Windsor Morning on Monday.

In an email, the city's forestry department told CBC News that it will conduct an assessment to understand the impact on tree cover after the storm clean-up.