If you’ve taken to the main roadways around Highlands and Cashiers over the past two weeks, you have likely found yourself delayed.
Aside from ongoing road construction projects on US64 and NC28, there have been crews contracted by the state of North Carolina and the US Army Corps of Engineers doing their part to clear debris from ditches, drainage areas, and roadsides following Hurricane Helene.
While that work is absolutely necessary to keep water flowing properly and not flooding local roads, it has brought up another concern.
What is going to happen to all the dead hemlocks along our major thoroughfares?
Following two months of drought conditions, the past week has brought on an onslaught of wind and rain. During the storms, several trees have been downed, many of them hemlocks. The trees have been cleared by private citizens, fire department employees, town and county staff, etc. but as soon as one is cleared another seems to fall. On US64 alone Sunday and Monday there were three separate incidents where dead hemlocks fell across the road. It was incredibly fortunate that no motorists were injured as a result.
The cause of many of the dead hemlock trees on the plateau is the hemlock woolly adelgid, a small insect that feeds on healthy hemlock trees.
The hemlock woolly adelgid kills trees slowly, affixing itself to the base of the hemlock needle where it feeds on the tree’s starch reserves. HWA feeding interferes with the tree’s ability to take up water and nutrients, producing a drought like response that some researchers have likened to an allergic reaction. As a result, the hemlock’s needles take on a grey and dusty appearance and begin to drop. Increasingly unable to photosynthesize as it loses its needles, the tree slowly dies from the bottom up.
These dead hemlocks then fall when storms arise, like we’ve seen the past few days. The bad news is, as many of the trees as have fallen, there are thousands more yet to fall.
If you are a property owner who has hemlock trees, please get your trees treated against the adelgid. For more information about the hemlock woolly adelgid, or how to treat your trees, visit savehemlocksnc.org.