Hi, TNTreeHugger, the tree that fell on the new deck did so in 2020, and was located on that homeowner's lot, not on Association land. I feel pretty sure there is no record of the event in the Association's documents. Sudden Valley doesn't keep track of tree problems that occur on people's lots. I only happened to find out about the deck-killer tree because the homeowner talked about it when I visited in response to his ACC request. I don't know how many other similar things have happened. Someone else I know had her large cedar tree evaluated by an arborist after noticing ripped roots during excavation next door, and had the tree taken down on the arborist's recommendation.
Sudden Valley probably should never have been allowed to come into being. The developer took steep hills covered in Pacific Northwest forest and divided the land into thousands of small lots and sold them to people as vacation-home lots. Only relatively few lots, scattered around the community, are built on at any one time. The good thing about that is the stormwater impacts are a lot lower than if everything were built out at once. The bad thing is, person 1 builds a nice vacation home in 1975 and lets the trees grow big on his lot. Then decades later person 2 builds a big home on the lot next door and his excavation wreaks havoc on the roots of person 1's trees.
Most often person 1 knows nothing about tree roots and isn't there watching during the excavation, so when the trees start to ail a couple of years later he doesn't connect the dots. It's only when the damage is so extreme that the tree can't even stay upright through the first strong wind that the tree's owner knows who to blame.