Safety measures for tree that dropped branch on busy road
A large gum tree that dropped a big branch onto a main thoroughfare in Richmond, sparking safety concerns and traffic chaos, has been given a clean bill of health.
The protected Tasmanian blue gum dropped the branch on Salisbury Rd on Monday January 15, closing the road for over two hours and bringing traffic in the town near Nelson to a standstill.
It happened just after 3pm, when several schools close to the tree would normally have been ending for the day, in term time.
Tasman District Council said its consultant arborist had since found the tree to be healthy, and not dangerous.
But the arborist recommended reducing the tree’s canopy to prevent it becoming a hazard, the council said.
Reserves team leader Richard Hilton said that would involve cutting exposed branches, reducing their end weight to help prevent the tree losing a branch in a heavy wind gust.
There was a recorded gust at the time of the failure. The canopy will be reduced back, probably in line with some of the other trees in the area”, he said.
Hilton anticipated the tree would be pruned to about the same size as a smaller protected Tasmanian blue gum, next to the one that dropped the branch.
“It will still overhang the road to a certain degree. It’s a balancing between reducing the length of the branches and not creating too big a wound, etcetera,” he said.
A protected tree could not be cut down without a resource consent, nor be pruned beyond the point where it would be detrimental to its health, Hilton said.
As the “category A” tree, which sat on Waimea College grounds, was not deemed dangerous, there was no recommendation it be removed, he said.
The pruning would ensure the tree was safe, “within reason”, he said.
“With all trees, if they’re well managed, looked after, then the risk of [branch] failure is greatly reduced.
“But of course you can never guarantee anything 100 per cent.”
The council endeavoured to check protected trees once every five years, unless a landowner was worried about a tree and asked the council to check it before then, he said.
He suggested the landowners of the tree on the Waimea College grounds have it checked once a year, for things like dieback.
The college’s new principal Fraser Hill said the school was not aware before the branch fell last month, that it was obliged to do regular checks on the stability of the two protected eucalyptus trees on the Salisbury Rd boundary.
The high school would now ensure it had a programme in place to ensure annual checks happened on the trees, he said.
The school was satisfied that the trees presented no risk in their current condition, according to the arborist’s report.
“However, we are hopeful that the recommended work on the trees to trim limbs will happen as soon as practical,” Hill said.
Hilton said on Wednesday he expected the pruning to happen in the next three or four weeks.
Council contractor, Treescape, was currently looking at how it would undertake the work, which involved traffic management, he said.
The work would probably involve a crane to lift out some of the timber from the higher canopy, so would probably be undertaken after 6pm, he said.