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Danger from NYC Trees, Part III

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Following three articles on this topic earlier in May, which I blogged about here, and an earlier piece I wrote after seeing tree pruners at work in Riverside Park, the NY Times has published another revealing article about tree care in New York City, or more accurately the decline of tree care in the city. While the Bloomberg administration has commendably pledged to plant one million trees before it leaves office at the end of 2013–and it claims to be halfway to that goal–the budget for maintaining and pruning the city’s existing trees has fallen drastically. Reporter Lisa W. Foderaro writes that the city’s tree-tending

“work force has shrunk, however, to 92 pruners and climbers today from 112 five years ago. The budget for street-tree care has fallen more sharply. The 600,000 trees on the city’s streets are largely maintained by outside tree-service contractors. Because of budget cuts, the pruning rotation has been stretched, to every 15 years from once every 7 years in 2008. During that time, the budget for street-tree pruning contracts fell to $1.4 million from $4.7 million.”

In the city’s parks, where hazards posed by untended trees often go undetected, she reports that

“Arborists and tree-care experts say that New York City could significantly improve public safety by ensuring that the workers who evaluate trees understand the warning signs of decay and failure.”

Despite the promise of greater safety such training offers, she reports on the decline of the tree care budget even while multi-million dollar damage awards continue to be paid to civil litigants, after fatalities and serious injuries occur. The city has a legal and moral responsibility to keep its inhabitants and visitors safe, within reasonable limits. While all urban hazard cannot be eliminated from our urban midst, the ones that are avoidable should be prevented to the maximum extent possible; when New York City fails to do so–even as reasonable safeguards are within reach–it is a moral and ethical failing. I cannot understand how the Mayor’s office allows this to continue. I will call my city councilperson to request that they restore the budget for tree care. Any other course is just stupid and negligent.

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Danger from NYC Trees, Part II

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May 16 Update: Turns out the NY Times article on Monday “Neglected, Rotting Trees Turn Deadly” was only the first of three this week on the dangers posed by inadequate maintenance of the city’s trees. The others are Ailing Trees Sound a Warning Before Falling and Suits Over Tree Injuries Show City’s Aggressive Legal Tactics. The first of these documents how the falling limbs and trees that have gravely injured people showed early signs of decay and arboreal ill health, while the second demonstrates that lawyers for the city don’t hesitate to play hardball in handling the legal cases of people for whom the city’s failure to tend to sick trees has led to grievous harm. Surveilling a woman who spent four months in the hospital after a hollow limb from a tree smashed into her? The city did it. This is appalling. We’d all be better off if this great wooded city spent its resources tending to our trees before they harm innocent New Yorkers.
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Readers may recall a recent post of mine about seeing tree pruners at work in my neighborhood and in nearby Riverside Park. I noticed and wrote about them, in part, because of incidents over the past couple years when a number of people have been seriously injured, even killed, by falling limbs. Today, the Times has a lengthy and disturbing article, Neglected, Rotting Trees Turn Deadly, on how slashed city budgets for tree care have led to more danger for pedestrians, cyclists, and people just trying to enjoy a bit of the pastoral amid all our urban activity. The pity is that there are known, empirical methods for establishing the health of city trees, but too often city and parks workers are not trained to detect them. The city ends up paying large awards to the injured and/or their survivors, with lives ruined or lost, and costing the city millions of dollars anyway. In one instance, parks workers were focused on trimming trees along the route of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, then four months off, only to fail in removing a Central Park tree that had already lost one limb in what turned out to be a tragic foreshadowing of the serious maiming of a New Yorker.

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Men in Trees

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Riding my bicycle uptown on Riverside Drive in Manhattan on Wednesday, parallel to the Hudson River at around 119th Street, I was surprised to see a convoy of vans all parked on the sidewalk adjacent to the road, where one usually sees dog walkers and strollers. I pulled over to ascertain why this posse of vehicles might be there, and then heard voices and shouts from overhead. I looked up and saw men in hard hats with ropes tied around their waists way up in the high limbs of the trees. There must have been ten of these guys, all a good 40 to 50 feet above the ground. They were wielding handsaws and trimming limbs which then fell to the earth below. Over the past couple years, New York City has suffered some tragic incidents where tree limbs have fallen on pedestrians and killed them, so I figured I was witnessing the trimming of dead limbs for public safety. The amazing thing was there was no cherry picker at hand, or FDNY vehicle that had helped them attain those heights–these guys all looked as if they had rappelled up in to the trees, or somehow hauled themselves up to where they could stand on those distant limbs. I took out my IPod Touch and against the backdrop of the late afternoon sky, took a couple pictures, hoping I would be able to view them later and assure myself that I had not just seen a New York apparition. After taking those shots, I got back on my bike, marveling that the New York City I love is always capable of presenting me with another unexpected sight. I never know where the next one might come from, right in front of my eyes, or up above me in the trees.

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