Tampa Bay lost thousands of trees to hurricanes, hitting residents’ wallets, emotions

If you've driven around Tampa Bay since the hurricanes, you've seen downed trees in the thousands. Many had a story.

There was the oak in Clearwater that shaded a home at sunset, keeping energy costs down. Two sugar maples reminded Tampa resident Stephanie Price of her late dad, who planted them in the 80s. An oak in Lana Vidic's St. Petersburg front yard had a swing where the kids always piled on for Christmas photos in matching pajamas.

A tree in the playground of Douglas Jamerson Elementary in St. Petersburg housed a bird's nest the students loved watching. When workers came to haul it away, two girls gave the tree an offering of flowers.

At a time when Tampa Bay's canopy is already threatened by development, the area's worst hurricane season in a century dealt a historic blow to its trees. Although the majority of trees are still standing, the losses could not just alter the look of some neighborhoods but also impact the people who live in them — emotionally, financially, maybe even medically, experts said.

With an eye toward the future, Shawn Landry, a research associate professor at the University of South Florida who's conducted studies on Tampa's urban forest, said it's important to learn from these hurricanes to replant trees that will last and minimize damage to homes and electrical lines. He suspects many of the trees that fell this year were less wind-resistant species.

"We can either live with lower canopy and higher heat," Landry said, "or we can plant new trees and plant the right tree in the right place and hopefully increase our canopy in a safer way."

How many trees were lost to 2024 hurricanes? The full extent of the region's tree loss won't be measured for months, but early estimates suggest it was extensive, especially during Milton's high winds.

The city of Tampa provided a web program for residents and emergency crews to report damage. Between Oct. 9 and Nov. 1, a period that only includes Milton, it logged more than 3,300 reports mentioning trees, according to data provided by city spokesperson Adam Smith. St. Petersburg received more than 2,000 reports of downed trees just near right-of-ways, roads and sidewalks, officials said. Around 600 trees came down in the Boyd Hill Nature Preserve.

Hillsborough County expects to collect a quarter of a million truckloads of vegetative debris alone.

The majority of Duke Energy's Florida power outages in hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton were caused by "vegetation or flying debris," said spokesperson Ana Gibbs. After Milton, more than one million Duke customers lost electricity.

Archie Collins, CEO of Tampa Electric Co., told the Tampa Bay Times that the amount of tree damage Milton wrought on the grid was "unprecedented." The company estimates trees and "related debris" caused nearly 90% of the outages during Milton, which impacted almost two-thirds of its customers.

Over the last decade, Tampa's tree canopy has declined significantly, Landry said, as measured by aerial imagery. Researchers suspect development is the culprit.

Landry's team will likely work next year to measure the hurricanes' effect on the canopy, but those results will take a while. Just looking at the mountains of chopped trunks and branches at debris collection sites, he said it's clear there's been "a huge loss."

Why fewer trees matter The benefits of an urban forest go beyond aesthetics. Before the storms, researchers had already found that local neighborhoods with fewer trees, often where lower-income people live, endured higher temperatures than more lush, well-off areas. Lower temperatures, in turn, mean it costs less to keep homes cool.

Trees also help cut down on dust ps in the air that worsen air quality, Landry said, which means places with more trees have fewer hospitalizations for asthma. Trees can also intercept rainfall to reduce storm water runoff that causes flooding. There are mental health benefits to trees as well, as research has found that hospital patients heal faster if they can see nature from their windows.

Rebecca Zarger, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida, said Tampa Bay residents have emotional connections with trees that have now been severed. Zarger conducted interviews with residents to help guide the city of Tampa's planting efforts. Mayor Jane Castor has pledged to plant 30,000 trees by 2030.

Many people have stories of important life events that happened around trees, Zarger said, like family reunions or holidays picnics. Some fruit trees have helped feed multiple households over generations.

Some residents said trees gave them a connection to past generations. People watched their kids grow up enjoying the shade of trees planted by grandparents long gone, or by strangers who lived in their houses when the neighborhoods were first built.

As they grew up, Karolyn Barganier's kids played under the shade from an oak in St. Petersburg's Old Northeast. Then when her mother died too soon from cancer, the family intertwined a night-blooming cereus cactus in its boughs as a tribute to her spirit. During Milton, both the tree and the cactus came crashing down.

"It is the same as losing a beloved friend," Barganier said.

Replanting smarter Many of the trees toppled during Milton were laurel oaks, a species known to have a shorter lifespan and less wind hardiness than its peers. Laurel oaks were popular when much of Tampa was developed in the 1950s, because they grow quickly. But when laurel oaks start to reach the end of their lives, they rot from the middle out, making them more likely to snap. This explains why some of the downed oaks in neighborhoods are hollowed out in the middle.

The sturdier live oaks appeared to fare better, and those that did fall often stayed intact but were ripped out at the roots, Landry said, when the soil became so saturated that the trees had nothing to grasp.

"The key to what happened during the storm to some extent is the legacy of bad decisions," he said, referring to laurel oaks. "Because of that bad decision, lots of people suffered."

But as trees are planted, local governments can be smarter about which kinds go where.

Both Landry and Zarger cautioned that public sentiment may swing more negative after so many people shelled out tens of thousands to have fallen trees removed. The cost of tree maintenance and removal was already keeping lower-income neighborhoods from being greener.

It will be up to public officials to work with residents, they said, to make replanting collaborative, in part by educating people why the newer trees could fare better if they are more suitable species.

Brent Dunn, a resident of Largo, said he had four avocado trees when he bought his home 20 years ago, which he believes were remnants of an old orchard. By the time Milton hit, only one remained. That sole surviving tree lasted through the blustery night of landfall but succumbed the next day, slowly falling onto a neighbor's roof.

But he saved a seed, he said, to continue its "strong history." He hopes it takes root soon, so it can bear fruit once more.

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