Old trees felled by strong winds at Kingston’s Cataraqui Cemetery

Taking care of Kingston’s 100-acre Cataraqui Cemetery is a big job, and it’s been made a little tougher over the last week.

The wind and rain that started on Halloween and continued off and on for the last week has toppled a number of trees in the historic cemetery.

The cemetery’s general manager, Bob Lemmon, says he has to think back two decades to remember this volume of trees blowing over.

“The last time we had something this bad was the ice storm,” Lemmon said.

Lemmon says they have an annual budget for tree maintenance and removing old and dying ones, but Mother Nature sped up the process this year.

“I’m going to say we had probably 15 big trees that came down,” Lemmon said.

Despite that, Lemmon says they’ve been lucky, as only a half-dozen monuments have been knocked over by the falling trees.

Work is already underway to place the monuments back on their base stones.

“We do not ask the families to pay for it — we get those monuments set up, and usually again, the wood does not harm the granite,” Lemmon told Global Kingston.

Lemmon estimates the entire cleanup will cost approximately $10,000 and take another two weeks.