PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Dangerous zombies could be taking over your yard. And it’s nothing to do with Halloween. It’s the trees — ‘zombie trees.’ They look healthy on the outside, but they are slowly dying from the inside out.
These monsters pose a year-round safety risk, because part or all of the tree could come down unexpectedly into yards, driveways and streets at any moment. But if they look OK on the outside, how can anyone spot them?
Jason Gaskill, an arborist with the Davey Tree Expert Company, says there are some signs to watch out for.
“You happen to see a tree, one of your trees has a broken limb, and that might hint that the tree had some wind stress. The tree might have some further issues — some cracks or some rooting issues.”
Storms, pests, disease and wood-decaying fungus are all potential causes of the conditions that could render a tree undead.
“We have a lot of techniques to be able to save trees from insect pressures and disease pressures,” Gaskill said. “We can do injections. We can do holistic approaches, where we can do deep-root sterilizations.”
Gaskill recommends annual tree inspections from an arborist to keep the trees stable and keep the monsters out.
“We are trained, where we can spot different ailments of trees pretty well. For cracks and things like that, we might have binoculars. And we have some simple tools — like a lightweight hammer — that we can detect if the tree is hollow or has decay, to see if it is uprooting or doing any movement.”