Emergency Tree Service in Westerly, RI

Westerly is the first Rhode Island town the Atlantic reaches.

Westerly sits at the far southwestern corner of Rhode Island, with open ocean along Watch Hill, Misquamicut, and Weekapaug and the Pawcatuck River as the Connecticut line. That exposure is why the town's storm history reads like a list of the region's worst: the 1938 Hurricane, Carol in 1954, Sandy's surge along Atlantic Avenue in 2012, and Tropical Storm Henri, which made landfall near Westerly in August 2021.

It isn't only hurricanes. When a strong north or northeast wind sets up behind a coastal low, the National Weather Service Boston/Norton (BOX) office regularly posts High Wind Watches and Warnings for Washington County, with gusts that can bring down mature oaks and pines inland from the beach as easily as on it. Downtown, Wilcox Park, and the older neighborhoods off Granite Street carry big street trees over tightly spaced homes and overhead lines.

Inland, much of Westerly's woodland is oak and white pine that took years of stress from the 2016–2017 spongy moth defoliation and the droughts that followed. Many of those trees are still standing dead or declining — and those are the first to fail when the wind comes up.