VANCOUVER -- A massive tree limb snapped off its trunk near Kitsilano Beach Park Tuesday evening and briefly trapped two young women underneath it.
"It narrowly missed them,” said Ian Worobetz, who saw the branch fall. “They crawled out from underneath the limbs and they had almost nothing on them except for a couple scratches on the arm, that was it."
Tuesday was the second time in a little more than a month that a tree maintained by the City of Vancouver has broken apart and landed on passersby. In late May, a tree near Victory Square fell onto Cambie Street, taking down live trolley wires and trapping two cars underneath it. No one was injured in that incident either.
City officials determined that internal white crown rot caused that tree to fall. There was no such problem for the Kits Beach tree limb, according to Howard Normann, acting manager of urban forestry for the Vancouver Park Board. He told CTV News on Wednesday that there was a little bit of rot on top of the branch, but that it wasn’t caused by any disease.
“Unfortunately, we can’t get on top of every single tree and look down,” Normann said. “This tree was inspected in 2012 in May. The hazard tree assessor thought it was in fairly good shape, so we left it.”
The branch that fell Tuesday was larger than some entire trees. It left a dent in the asphalt path from Kits Beach to Cornwall Avenue where it came down.
Normann said the “pocket” of rot on top of the limb would have been hard for inspectors to detect, and may not have even caused the break. “Sometimes, limbs just fall off,” he said, especially in hot weather, when older trees tend to suck up a lot of water in a short amount of time.
In 2011, a heavy bolt was driven into the tree to keep it from splitting and a cable was added to hold up some of its higher branches, not the one that fell.
Norm Oberson, a private arborist with Arbutus Tree Service, told CTV News that those precautions should have led to a more thorough inspection of the tree, which should have found the problem with the branch that fell.
“It should have been bolted,” Oberson said. “It should have been cabled. It wasn’t. It’s failed, and it’s occurred over a high-target area. There’s a lot of sidewalks, a lot of pedestrian traffic through here.”
The trees in the vicinity of the one that fell Tuesday were scheduled for inspection soon, Normann said. They’ll be inspected even sooner, now. He said the branches of nearby trees were assessed for failure risk Wednesday morning as a result of the incident night before.
As for whether Tuesday’s fallen branch and May’s downed tree are signs of a larger problem with how the city maintains its trees, Normann doesn’t see it that way.
“We can’t stop every single one of them, but I think that with our crews that are out there and the work that we do and the management program we have, I think we do a really, really good job of maintaining the safety of the citizens by inspecting these trees annually,” he said.
