Ten days after Tropical Storm Isaias ripped through New York, almost a quarter of the trees and branches that toppled onto city streets and sidewalks still haven't been cleared away.
More than 3,000 fully grown trees were uprooted across the five boroughs, the most since Hurricane Sandy, when over 10,000 trees came crashing down. The Parks Department has so far received nearly 7,000 reports for fallen or hanging limbs.
Of the roughly 10,000 emergency work orders generated by the Parks Department, 78 percent were resolved as of Thursday, according to an agency spokesperson. Queens endured the most damage, followed by Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Maurice Pinzon, a Flushing resident, said a massive fallen tree had been blocking his street for six days when the driver of a van plowed into the trunk on Saturday night. Forestry workers with the Parks Department arrived on Sunday to clear the tree, he said.
"It took longer than it should have. We're two blocks away from the [NewYork-Presbyterian Queens] hospital," Pinzon said. "It was obstructing ambulances and firetrucks."
A downed tree blocking an ambulance in Flushing, Queens
The Parks Department received more service requests stemming from the storm than they normally do over a four month period, a spokesperson said.
Winds that reached 70 miles-per-hour knocked out power for more than 250,000 New Yorkers, many of whom did not see their lights turned back on until this week.
Bay Ridge Councilman Justin Brannan, whose district suffered widespread outages, blamed some of the damage on chronic underfunding to the city's Parks Department, which is charged with maintaining trees.
The agency's budget was slashed by 13.1 percent last month, a proportion significantly higher than many other city departments, including the NYPD.
Following Isaias, the Parks Department deployed more than 500 of their own employees, while receiving help from hundreds of workers in sister agencies, emergency contracts and mutual aid groups, according to an agency spokesperson.
The department also works closely with nonprofits, such as Central Park Conservancy, Friends of the High Line, and the Prospect Park Alliance, to clear trees inside parks.
But at a time when more New Yorkers are using their parks than ever, some of those nonprofits have been forced to cut down on staff and supplemental cleaning crews because of the pandemic's impact on revenue. Citing such issues, the Prospect Park Alliance recently put out a call asking for volunteers to help pick up trash.
According to Christian Zimmerman, the vice president of capital and landscape management for the Prospect Park Alliance, it will likely be a few more weeks until the fallen trees inside Prospect Park are entirely cleared.
"Two to three weeks for a storm of this magnitude is pretty good," he told Gothamist. "It's not just taking the trees down. It's bringing them somewhere and making it safe. They have to be chipped."
"Storms like this, thankfully they don't happen all that often," he added. "We've been dealt a pretty bad hand this summer."
