Seventy-three trees at Lighthouse Point Park were either toppled or so badly damaged that they need to be removed thanks to last week’s high-wind storm, and another 56 need to be pruned to address broken branches — but should otherwise remain standing. City Tree System Coordinator / Tree War den Annie Mixsell provided the Independent with that update Monday afternoon, in the wake of an overnight storm Thursday that also caused significant damage to the historic carousel building. That total of 129 trees is out of several hundred in the more open area of the park with the picnic tables, lawns, buildings, and parking, as opposed to the more densely forested area of the park. Last week’s storm has left the park indefinitely closed to the public, as the city works to figure out if the carousel building can be saved — and what needs to be cleaned up in order for the waterfront park to be safe for visitors to return to. Mixsell was out inspecting trees at the Morris Cove park Monday morning, just as she’s done each day since Thursday. “We’re picking away at it,” she said, and “making some pretty decent progress” in identifying which trees have fallen over, which are so badly damaged that they need to be removed, and which have been battered but can otherwise stay in place after some pruning. Mixsell said that a wide variety of trees were damaged by last week’s storm. There were oaks and hickories in the more heavily forested areas of the park. In the more open areas of the park, there were black locusts, black cherries, oaks, maples, and lindens. “In the parts where the strongest winds were, there wasn’t much that was spared,” she said. “I did notice a couple of elms completely unscathed,” she added. Mixsell said that the park lost “some very large oaks, some very large black cherries [and] maples by the picnic area.” Just how large? Some of the fallen oaks “are over three feet [in] diameter,” she said. There were also some “multi-trunked” black cherries that were two or three feet in diameter that were toppled. “We are salvaging as much as possible” with the hopes that the wood from the fallen trees “can be used in some way,” Mixsell said, perhaps as benches at the park. Mixsell recalled driving to the park soon after 7 a.m. on Thursday with the city parks chief Max Webster and saying to him, “I could cry,” when she saw all of the damaged trees. Just last winter, her division had “done maintenance pruning” on just about every tree that wound up falling due to the storm. She said that, in May, Lighthouse Point Park hosted the Connecticut Tree Climbing Competition. Many of the trees used in that competition also wound up falling because of the storm. “It’s sad and it’s terrible,” she said about all the tree wreckage. It’s also an opportunity to think about how “we can replant and we can plan” for where trees should be placed in the park. Why exactly did last week’s storm cause such widespread damage to the park’s trees? Mixsell pointed to the storm’s wind speeds, which reportedly reached 100 miles per hour or more. “Those trees didn’t have a chance with that threshold of wind.” What’s next for her division’s tree work at Lighthouse Point Park? In the next week or two, Mixsell said, “we’ll have made great progress on trees,” getting everything “as pruned as possible” so that the park can be made safe to return to for the public. Next she and city parks leaders will need to sit down and think through “where trees belong in the park,” and come up with a replanting plan. More broadly speaking, she also pointed to her division’s Tree Master Plan efforts. “This plan will guide the city in the management of our public trees for the next 50 years.” Click here to fill out the city’s Tree Plan Community Survey, and click here to read a StoryMap with more info. The post Lighthouse Storm Update: 129 Trees Damaged appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less