10 thoughts on “Eye on the Street”


  2. Any word on damage to apartments or people within? Am hoping that it’s just roof damage.

  4. Older son has friend that lives in this building… In the apartment right next to where this tree fell, in fact! His mom told me the apartment this tree fell on was empty. Thank god for that, because the bedrooms in these apartments are upstairs and this tree crushed the roof. My son’s friend and his family are fine… Only a broken window and a bad scare.

    1. Your friend’s son might want to get a lottery ticket as it seems today is his lucky day (aside from the damage to the building of course).

  6. Ok, this event, and the many, many falling tree events like it that happen every time there’s high winds, a lot of rain, ice storms, tornados, hurricanes, basically any stormy weather, makes me want something that probably isn’t popular with either the tree preservation or homeowner rights preservation crowds. Don’t we need more active tree health monitoring as a municipal service? Just like we have monitoring for fire, traffic, gas leak, etc. safety? Relying on homeowners, landlords, business owners, or business tenants with no expertise in trees, tree health, the risk posed to buildings, tree maintenance, tree remediation, and/or tree removal, seems to be inadequate. When a tree falls, the damage is often not to the home or business owner, who may or may not have been negligent in detecting and removing a risky tree, but to the homes and lives of neighbors or the occupants of cars passing by. I know I can contact neighbors if I think their tree threatens my property or home. But how would I know? I look up and see lots of tree tops in the mature tree canopy all around us. Most the time I can’t even tell whose property the trunk emerges from, never mind whether the tree is healthy or not or whether it would be likely to fall in our direction. All of the trees are so tall that they look threatening and capable of landing on our home, garage, or yard.

    I’m theoretically in favor of a tree canopy as opposed to asphalt desert but I’m also for tree canopy safety.

    1. There was a large tree down at Mountain View and Sycamore Tuesday. I happened to run into the tree guy who evaluated it a few weeks ago, including having the City Arborist look at it, and then did a pretty extensive job taking out all the dead and dying branches. Everyone said it looked fine, then a week later it came down, thankfully without any injuries or damage other than taking out a power pole. Moral of the story – you can’t always tell what the root structure looks like from above-the-ground observations, so even due diligence doesn’t always pay.

      1. I know that arborist inspections probably yield some false negatives and false positives but their predictive ability has to be better than mine which is essentially zero unless the tree has no bark and no leaves. Then I have a clue.

        But given your comment, is there no technology, e.g. ultrasound, that can examine root structure of trees and predict viability, ability to hold fast in the ground? If not, wouldn’t that be a good idea? Or maybe some dye injection or catheterization technique?

        1. The short answer to your question is “Not really”. I’ve seen many trees go down that had a great canopy and no internal problems, some just after they were professionally evaluated and determined to be healthy while nearby trees that were a concern stood just fine. It’s nature, it is not predictable. And the people who do the evaluations don’t make any guarantees.

    2. Agreed. Which is why I just scheduled an independent arborist to do a walk around of our property. Haven’t had much luck getting the City arborist out and would rather not wait.

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