UPDATE: As of December 30, 2025, I am updating this post.
Time will tell if this New Year’s week bomb cyclone has caused unusual damage in UP forests. The unprecedented ice storm this past spring did create damage beyond local memory, and will have lasting effects for wildlife, insects, fire risk, and forestry.
This is the post I wrote immediately in the aftermath of that storm.
I’m not a forester but I suspect damage like that shown above will have implications for insects, wildlife and fire risk going forward.
I’ll be speaking to Michigan Rural Democrats this weekend, and one of the topics will be last week’s ice storm, the most severe in living memory, which crushed trees, houses, and infrastructure in both peninsulas.
In each of the last three springtimes, the state has seen rare and highly destructive weather events.
In 2023, choking smoke from wildfires in Canada drove residents indoors for large parts of the summer. In 2024, the state had its first declared “Tornado Emergency”, the highest threat level according to NOAA.
This year, an ice storm unlike any other.
The only clear trends for weather extremes in the state are extreme precipitation, and rising temperatures. Tornadoes have no clear trend, although the conditions for tornadoes may be more common. Ice storms are too rare to make a determination.
But insurance companies have definitely noticed that something is going on.
Michigan is one of 18 states where, according to the New York Times, home insurers suffered losses in 2023, up from just 8 states 10 years earlier.
UPDATE: This Accuweather report included an interview with a DNR official. The official, as well as the accuweather reporters noted they had never seen this kind of damage. The official noted that impacts to the forest will have effects for “decades. “the next 40 or 50 years.”
UPDATE: This Detroit Channel 2 report was produced late in the year, looking back on the damages. In this excerpt, a DNR official is interviewed.
I had to look it up: I know some trees and shrubs grow back if the root system and stump are still alive, but it turns out that pine trees won’t recover. (There’s no need to grind out the stump, for example.)
This may either give an advantage to hardwood trees filling in the cleared openings, or, if there is a fire, any pine trees that actually rely on fire to re-seed will have a new generation.