For trees, death by gas leak is out of the shadows

Amid the lush green front lawns along the 100 block of McCarthy Road, Ackley points to a large patch around a small tree where no grass is growing and to the upper branches of the tree that were bare of foliage.

“That tree should be fully leafing out and healthy,” Ackley said. “There’s no reason for it not to be other than there’s a gas leak there.”

Ackley, a gas-line specialist who co-founded the Massachusetts Shade Tree Trust, said gas leaking near the tree was pushing oxygen out of the soil and killing the grass and the tree roots.

In addition to Newton, the communities of Quincy, Brookline, Hingham, Saugus, Milton, Nahant, Lynn, and Revere have signed on with the trust to search out where gas leaks have damaged public trees, Ackley said.

The Trust — co-founded by Jan Schlichtmann, the Beverly lawyer made famous by the movie “A Civil Action’’ — says it has found $1.1 million in damage to trees in Brookline, and Ackley said he has found hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to trees in the other communities.

After assessing the damage, the trust works with the communities to seek reimbursement from National Grid and other gas companies.

In Quincy, where Ackley estimated gas leaks caused more than $850,000 in damage to trees, City Council President Kevin Coughlin said he began to recognize the problem when his constituents reported smelling gas and would then report damage to their trees.

Coughlin said the trees are assets to Quincy, and National Grid needs to repair its infrastructure and make the cities and towns whole for any damage caused by gas leaks.

“These are taxpayer dollars that fund the planting of these trees,” Coughlin said.

According to Ackley, communities are “getting saddled with the cost of pruning, removal, replanting, and that is the real tragedy. You take this tree down, and put another tree in, and that one is going to die.”

But National Grid says the group’s claims are highly inflated. Spokesman David Graves said no data support the contentions of widespread damage to trees caused by natural gas leaks.

When natural gas damages a tree, Graves said, National Grid removes the tree and replaces the tree at its own expense. “It’s our position that the trust has grossly overestimated the damage done to trees by natural gas exposure,” he said.

Graves said most of the damage done to trees is done by disease, insects, restricted root growth, road salt, and being hit by cars.

The gas leaks are often caused by aging and corroding pipes, and small leaks at their joints, and Ackley said he reports each leak he finds to the gas companies. Larger leaks are repaired immediately, but Ackley said gas companies don’t bother to fix the smaller leaks despite the damage they can cause to trees.

“The slaughter of public shade trees that has gone on in Massachusetts the last 25-30 years is mind-boggling,” Ackley said.

Graves said National Grid follows state and federal requirements for repairing gas leaks. He said serious leaks are repaired immediately, less severe leaks are scheduled for repairs, and the smallest leaks that are determined not to be a hazard are not repaired, but are monitored.