Emergency Tree Service in Wayne, NJ

Wayne's lake communities were built into the woods, and the woods are still standing over the houses.

Wayne is a big township with very different kinds of ground in it. Packanack Lake, Pines Lake, and Lionshead Lake began as lake communities in the hills, with houses set into oak and hickory woods on rocky slopes. Preakness and the ridges toward High Mountain are wooded and steep. The southern and western neighborhoods sit low, along the Pompton and Passaic rivers, on flat ground where the soil stays wet.

Each part of town fails its own way. On the hillside lots, tall oaks rooted in shallow soil over rock tip over once the ground is saturated, often toward the house downhill. Along the rivers, flooding from storms like Irene in 2011 soaks the root zone for days, and trees that survived the water come down in the next wind.

The October 2011 snowstorm, Sandy in 2012, and Isaias in August 2020 all brought down trees and lines across the township. Wayne is split between two utilities, PSE&G for most of the township and JCP&L for the rest, so neighbors on different circuits can see very different restoration times after the same storm.