Trees will be checked again following death
The safety of braced trees in Rotorua is being checked after the tragic death of a preschool teacher crushed by a falling oak.
The 150-year-old tree, known as Spencer’s Oak, split in two during Friday’s storm, falling on a building and crushing the car being driven by Trish Butterworth.
Rotorua Lakes Council was warned by an arborist in recent months of concerns about the tree and responded by getting an inspection done by its contractor. Bracing on the tree was replaced and branches removed.
Senior Sergeant Dennis Murphy of Rotorua said police were carrying out an inquiry on behalf of the coroner.
“The inquiry will include all aspects of the incident, including the state of the tree. The process started immediately and is ongoing. It is not going to be over in a week.”
Acting chief executive Craig Tiriana said the council would co-operate fully.
“We are in the process of gathering all relevant information.”
He said about 10 other trees in the district were braced to maintain their structure. They included trees at the Rotorua lakefront, Government Gardens, Koutu Rd, Jean Batten Park and Stoney Pt at Tarawera.
“Braced trees have been checked in recent months by council contractors and these, along with others, will be assessed again as part of our post-storm checks.”
Meanwhile, some residents are looking at months of repairs while others have taken it as a wake-up call to be more prepared for emergencies.
A family heartbroken after a 10m tree crashed through the roof of their marae are waiting to get an engineer in to assess the damage.
Ida Brailey, who lives next to Paruaharanui Marae, said the family hoped to get repairs under way as soon as possible.
“We’ve organised a fundraising committee and have had a couple of meetings but we are still waiting for the engineer . . . We have gotten over the shock of it, the damage doesn’t look so bad now the tree has been taken out.”
The marae was not insured for such damage.
A Western Heights resident who was without power for nearly three days said she would look at improving her emergency kit.
The woman, who wished to remain anonymous, said her house lost electricity when a power line was brought down on Thursday night.
Her family spent hundreds of dollars buying food and travelling to a family member’s house so her children could have hot showers.
“It wasn’t a pleasant experience. We had candles but didn’t have much else in the way of an emergency kit. We were just fortunate that we had a reserve of money to rely on. But not everybody has that luxury.”
She said power company Unison was notified of the outage on Thursday night, but it wasn’t resolved until Sunday morning.
Unison relationship manager Danny Gough acknowledged the call centre had not responded as quickly as possible and apologised.
“It is an external call centre that also works for a number of other companies so while they had extra staff working, it was during a time when tens of thousands of customers lost power.”