Tree Service in Springfield, NJ

01 Locally Owned · Family-Run Crew

A Crew That Knows Springfield’s Two Halves

After Springfield floods, the trees still standing are the ones to worry about, because the ground under them has changed. We own our cranes and bucket trucks rather than hiring them in, and the company is registered with the New Jersey Board of Tree Experts with Peter Ahlert as Licensed Tree Care Operator.

Tree removal in Springfield often follows the water rather than the wind: ground that has been saturated stops holding, and the tree goes with it. We check the root plate first, prune what is sound, and take out what is not, in sections, with the stump ground below grade and the brush chipped on site.

How we work, and who we are

03 Local Conditions

In Springfield the Tree Comes Down After the Water, Not During the Storm

Springfield is small and low: 5.17 square miles on the northern edge of Union County, sitting at about 138 feet where the Watchung ridge drops away into the Rahway River valley. The township took its name from the springs and brooks in the area, and there were enough of them that the main road through town was once known as Seven Bridges Road: that is how many crossings it took to get over the streams feeding the Rahway. Those streams are still there, and they are why the low half of Springfield behaves the way it does in a heavy rain.

When Ida came through in September 2021 the township's mayor said the damage was worse than Hurricane Irene a decade earlier. Localised rainfall approached ten inches in twenty-four hours, and the 82-square-mile Rahway River basin drains a large part of Union County through this valley. Flood control on the Rahway has been studied by the Army Corps of Engineers for years without a scheme being built.

What that does to a tree is not obvious from the curb. Saturated soil loses the shear strength that holds a root plate in place, so a tree can ride out the storm that soaked the ground and then fail weeks later in an ordinary autumn wind, with no new weather to blame. This is why we look at the ground before we look at the crown on the river side of town: a root plate that has lifted, soil cracked or heaved on the upwind side, a lean that was not there last year.

Up on the ridge the failure mode is the reverse. Those trees are on thinner, better-drained soil and take the wind directly, so what we are reading there is structure (included bark in a fork, old storm wounds, deadwood over the roof) rather than the footing. Two halves of one small township, two different questions, and the answer to which one you have starts with where the property sits.

Source: Township of Springfield, About Springfield (township history and geography)