How you can mitigate the uprooting of trees

Although it is common for dead trees to fall over during storms, this was not the case for a healthy Water Oak Tree that fell in Crescent Park near Tunnel Boulevard and Ridgeside in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Lead Certified Arborist Benjamin Moore at Scenic City Arborists says that "trees are kind of like dominoes, so when you have one of them fail in an area, you can have others fall over as well in subsequent years of flooding. So whenever you have these saturated soils or the amount of rainfall that we've had recently, it will make the soil fail. So, it's not necessarily a fault of the tree. The roots are not necessarily what failed."

Moore says although the roots from this healthy and structural tree were less than 2 feet deep, tree roots grow wider instead of deeper. That's why t