After the snow comes the cleanup.
A few weeks of warm weather have revealed that the yards and roadsides around the Island, previously buried under 20 inches of snow, have one major thing in common: a tangled array of downed trees and branches, from tiny twigs to full-grown pines cracked in half.
Cleanup is well underway for state, municipal and private tree specialists, but there is still much to be done.
“Nearly every road in town has some sort of tree damage, whether it’s big trees or limbs or just debris all over the place,” said Oak Bluffs highway superintendent and tree warden Richard Combra. “But we’re working on it.”
In an interview with the Gazette Monday, Mr. Combra said the destruction of February’s storm resembled that of a hurricane.
“We’ve got probably weeks or possibly months worth of cleanup,” he said. “I’m not exactly sure how much we’ll be spending as of yet, but a lot more money than we have in past snowstorms.”
In Edgartown, numerous trees did not survive the blizzard, but there was no catastrophic damage, said town administrator James Hagerty. Still, the storm packed quite a punch, leaving branches littering the town’s streets and sidewalks and town crews toiling to pick up the debris.
Mr. Hagerty noted that the damage is widespread, especially on Chappy.
“Last time was Hurricane Bob when you saw that,” he said.
To help pay the costs of the entire cleanup effort — including plowing, tree cleanup and running the warming shelter at the school — the town has submitted a $300,000 claim to the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. The agency is hoping to secure federal aid for southeastern municipalities impacted by the storm.
In the meantime, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) is running cleanup efforts in Manuel Correllus State Forest.
In a statement to the Gazette, DCR said the roads within the forest, Sanderson avenue and shared use paths have been cleared. The department added that wooded trails are still being assessed.
“The forest did not sustain any damage outside of downed trees,” wrote DCR deputy communications director Ilyse Wolberg. “Currently, we are expecting the clearing process to take a few weeks.”
The pressure is also on for private tree removal services, said Josh Scott, founder of Beetlebung Tree Care, now part of SavATree.
“I can’t go 10 feet without noticing storm damage everywhere,” he said.
Mr. Scott said he hasn’t seen a storm wreak havoc like this on the Island in about 15 years.
“It’s amazing how many downed trees and limbs are on the edges of the state roads and the town roads,” he said. “It’s kind of a hazard because they’re really close to the road, so there’s no real shoulder.”
Evergreens and conifers — eastern red cedars, spruces, Leyland cypresses — got hit the hardest, as their full branches were weighed down with heavy, wet snow. But no family of tree was truly safe, Mr. Scott said.
“I’m looking at a big pear tree right now with big broken limbs off of it,” he said.
Adam Moore, president of the Sheriff’s Meadow Foundation, made a similar assessment. Sheriff’s Meadow owns and manages 2,482 acres of land across the Island.
“We had a lot of cedars and pines and spruces that were either toppled over or broken because of the storm,” he said. “It’s going to take a long time to completely finish cleaning up.”
He said that Sheriff’s Meadow staff are taking care of the damage and have not yet faced anything too severe to tackle on their own.
“It’s nothing that you wouldn’t expect after a big blizzard like this,” he said.
Though the cold, snowy weather brought a lot of trees down, it may have saved some trees in other ways, according to the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (DFW).
In a recent statement, the department said that this winter saw sustained cold temperatures potentially strong enough to kill off the majority of the overwintering population of southern pine beetles, the destructive forest pests that have been decimating pitch and white pine trees across the Island.
“Prolonged cold can deliver surprising benefits to our forests and habitats,” DFW’s statement said.
Mr. Scott said cleaning up the Island’s remaining downed trees will likely take a month or two. Though he noted that a high volume of post-storm calls has bottlenecked operations for landscapers and treeworkers like himself, he also said there are no plans to slow down.
“Everybody’s cleaning up the best they can with the resources that they have,” he said. “It’s gonna be a busy spring.”
Ethan Genter contributed to this report.
This article appears in March 13, 2026.