Danger from NYC Trees, Part II

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.

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.