Nature is once again open for business on campus.
More than a month after a severe ice storm produced the worst damage since Hurricane Fran, cleanup at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens and the Duke Forest is almost finished, and both areas should be completely open this week.
Pedestrians gained access to the gardens around Christmas and to the Al Buehler Trail around the Washington Duke Inn and Golf Course in mid-January, but have encountered "No Trespassing" signs at most of the gates to the Duke Forest.
"We're in the last few days of removing some of these hanging dangerous limbs," said Duke Forest Resource Manager Judson Edeburn. "We're just working on the Durham [County] division now. Certainly by sometime [this] week, we will open the remaining areas."
Edeburn said some people have ignored the closed gates.
"We are certainly not out there patrolling it on a daily basis, but there is some usage that has gone on," he said. "We hope that no one gets injured when they are gaining unauthorized access."
It is still too early to determine how much the total Duke Forest cleanup will cost, Edeburn said, but it will probably end up in the tens of thousands of dollars--a fraction of the Hurricane Fran cost, when the University spent $200,000 just removing debris from the forest roads.
Two crews were brought in over the past month to remove the extremely dangerous "widow makers"--hanging limbs that could fall at any time. Another three crews used chainsaws to remove material from the roads and fire trails.
Greg Nace, associate director of horticulture for the gardens, said the cleanup there is about 98 percent complete.
"We still have quite a few tree trunks to remove," he said. "There are some trees that have tops broken off of them."
About 75 trees came down in the gardens during or after the early December storm, and another 25 or so still need to be taken down, Nace said. Gardens officials will sell the logs from those trees to try to recoup some of the $100,000 in expenses of the cleanup--more than the Fran damages for the gardens. In addition to the gardens' own permanent staff, four different contractors were hired to help in the cleanup.
"It's the worst ice storm anyone here has ever experienced," Nace said in December. "We've seen damage in the gardens before, but nothing on this scale."
Forty replacement trees, shrubs and other plants costing $15,000 have been ordered through nurseries and will be planted in the spring. The University will not replace native pines, oaks and other non-ornamental trees lost.
Oak trees were especially hit hard because they still had their leaves on the trees and they collected a lot more weight than they could handle, Nace said. The tops of pine trees also suffered greatly, and because pines cannot regenerate, crews needed to cut down about 50 and perform major tree surgery on many others.
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