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Dead like a not necessarily dead thing.
Jun. 19th, 2007 09:14 pmOne of my gripes with a newspaper career was the occasional need to write an obituary for a famous person before he or she was actually dead. I could never bring myself to do it. Yet that is what this entry is- a death notice for a multiple homicide coming soon to a neighborhood near me.
This, boys and girls, is my neighborhood. It does not contain a supermarket, so when you see a red dot, you do NOT save a lot. Rather, you cry, because these are the trees which have been selected for down-to-the-stump complete removal as a result of October's storm:
According to one newspaper depiction of the result of this hysterical decimation (from a similarly doomed street in the town not included in the map above), if our brilliant governmental minds get their way, that street, and much in the same way mine, will go from looking like this
to looking like this
practically overnight.
Many of these trees can be saved. The most damaged one on our property has come back in full bloom and just needs some bracing and a little love. But that's not the FEMA way, at least when it comes to the "street trees" which, unlike our recovering one, are adjacent to the curb and, therefore, not legally ours. No, they will only reimburse for tree repair (defined locally, it seems, as "removal") for one year following the date of a storm, and local officials seem hell bent on making sure they get every penny budgeted for and spent before that year is up in mid-October. They are also making lawyer-fed noises about being worried about lawsuits if a pruned but undestroyed tree should fall in a couple of years' time, injuring someone.
Months ago, arborists began marking trees with spray-painted X's and orange ribbons. Nothing was ever said about what they meant; rumors had it they were mere reminders to "check this one later." Now, those ribbons and Xs turn out in almost all cases to be death sentences, to be carried out in a blitzkrieg over the next couple of weeks before homeowners can react.
After an outcry in the past week about this going on in this town (and a similar one about a similar project in the City of Buffalo where the main tree-murdering contractor turns out to be owned by the county executive's sister-in-law), there's been some stepping-back from the chainsaws. Or so they say. In our town, supposedly, the decimation will now be "staged," so only the 2,000 or so most-damaged trees will be whacked first while salvageable ones might last, maybe even past the October anniversary. Unless that's just a forest-screen to keep us from paying attention while they send out crews in the middle of a Monday when we're all at work, coming home to find sawdust on our sidewalks where old-growth way older than us (and sometimes older than the freaking town) used to stand proudly. Through snow and rain and the worst of storms until they met the enemy, which of course is us.
This, boys and girls, is my neighborhood. It does not contain a supermarket, so when you see a red dot, you do NOT save a lot. Rather, you cry, because these are the trees which have been selected for down-to-the-stump complete removal as a result of October's storm:
According to one newspaper depiction of the result of this hysterical decimation (from a similarly doomed street in the town not included in the map above), if our brilliant governmental minds get their way, that street, and much in the same way mine, will go from looking like this
to looking like this
practically overnight.
Many of these trees can be saved. The most damaged one on our property has come back in full bloom and just needs some bracing and a little love. But that's not the FEMA way, at least when it comes to the "street trees" which, unlike our recovering one, are adjacent to the curb and, therefore, not legally ours. No, they will only reimburse for tree repair (defined locally, it seems, as "removal") for one year following the date of a storm, and local officials seem hell bent on making sure they get every penny budgeted for and spent before that year is up in mid-October. They are also making lawyer-fed noises about being worried about lawsuits if a pruned but undestroyed tree should fall in a couple of years' time, injuring someone.
Months ago, arborists began marking trees with spray-painted X's and orange ribbons. Nothing was ever said about what they meant; rumors had it they were mere reminders to "check this one later." Now, those ribbons and Xs turn out in almost all cases to be death sentences, to be carried out in a blitzkrieg over the next couple of weeks before homeowners can react.
After an outcry in the past week about this going on in this town (and a similar one about a similar project in the City of Buffalo where the main tree-murdering contractor turns out to be owned by the county executive's sister-in-law), there's been some stepping-back from the chainsaws. Or so they say. In our town, supposedly, the decimation will now be "staged," so only the 2,000 or so most-damaged trees will be whacked first while salvageable ones might last, maybe even past the October anniversary. Unless that's just a forest-screen to keep us from paying attention while they send out crews in the middle of a Monday when we're all at work, coming home to find sawdust on our sidewalks where old-growth way older than us (and sometimes older than the freaking town) used to stand proudly. Through snow and rain and the worst of storms until they met the enemy, which of course is us.