IPR file
Children play on some of the downed trees near Redmond Park in Cedar Rapids in the wake of the Aug. 10 derecho.
Six months after the derecho carved a path of devastation across Iowa, the city of Cedar Rapids is advancing a plan to regrow its urban forest. It will take years to restore the towering trees that were leveled by the hurricane-force winds; some 70 percent of the public tree canopy has been lost since the storm.
The sight of massive, centuries-old trees uprooted entirely were among the most searing images in the aftermath of the Aug. 10 derecho. The breathtakingly intense straight-line wind storm leveled trees older than the state of Iowa, some peeling back the earth as they bowed and shattered beneath the 140 mile per hour winds, comparable to a Category 4 hurricane.