Branch falls in park, and a life is shattered
Now, victim and her family await the city’s assistance
In the days since Emma Zhou was hit by a 100pound tree branch in a North Beach park, her husband, Tony Tan, has struggled not to come undone.
He has temporarily moved out of the couple’s two-bedroom home in San Pablo, preferring to sleep in a reclining armchair next to Zhou’s hospital bed. With each surgery and procedure Zhou has undergone, Tan has signed a flurry of consent forms without stopping to read the fine print. When the couple’s 5-year-old daughter started kindergarten last week, her grandmother had to accompany her into the classroom.
“Life is never going to be normal for us again,” Tan said.
Zhou suffered a fractured skull and broken spine when the branch from a city-maintained pine tree fell 50 feet and landed on her in Washington Square Park on Aug. 12. Doctors tell the family she faces up to 16 more months of hospital rehabilitation and will probably never walk again.
Tan said Mayor Ed Lee, who visited the couple privately, has promised him that the city will pay all his wife’s medical expenses, but officials won’t confirm that.
“The city is in the process of investigating the
matter,” said Matt Dorsey, a spokesman for City Attorney Dennis Herrera. “In general terms, whenever the city is responsible for a harm, we do everything we can to work in good faith with claimants. It’s always our hope to reach a fair resolution amicably and without the need for litigation.”
Deirdre Hussey, a spokeswoman for the mayor, declined to say whether Lee promised the city’s help or what that might entail.
Meanwhile, a GoFundMe page launched by a family member has raised more than half its $50,000 goal for Zhou.
Recreation and Park Director Phil Ginsburg, whose department is responsible for maintaining the trees in Washington Square Park, tweeted a link to the fundraising page last week. In a statement, he called what happened to Zhou a “freak accident” that “touched us all on a very human level.”
Lee visited the couple Tuesday night. In a photo taken by the family, Zhou, 36, wears a neck brace and peers up from her hospital bed, her dark hair feathered across the pillow. Tan holds her forearm. Lee is the only one smiling.
“I spent time with them discussing the impact of this tragedy and how we can help this young family,” Lee said in a statement. “Emma seemed in good spirits . ... They also asked for some additional support that we are working on.”
Lee said he was helping the couple transfer their two daughters, ages 5 and 9, into the San Francisco Unified School District so they can be closer to their parents and Tan’s mother, who lives in Visitacion Valley. The girls, who are enrolled in a public school in San Pablo, are being cared for by their grandmother.
The girls were playing in the sandbox at the park at Columbus Avenue and Filbert Street before a dental appointment when Zhou was hit by the limb from a Canary Island pine tree. Rec and Park officials say the tree was last pruned in 2013, through a gift from a neighborhood group. It had last been inspected by city workers in 2010, when Rec and Park found it in “good condition” — giving it four out of five stars on an assessment scale.
Arborists for the city have examined the tree twice since Zhou was hit and say it is healthy, according to the mayor.
Rec and Park has long suffered a shortage of money to maintain trees, according to a report by the Parks Alliance, a nonprofit that supports the city’s parks. Each of the 177,000 trees on Rec and Park land is scheduled to be serviced only once every 105 years, and the agency often relies on neighborhood groups to pick up the slack — as was the case with the Washington Square Park tree.
About 2 percent of the department’s $168.5 million budget is set aside this year for urban forestry, a category that includes tree maintenance. An additional $750,000 is allotted for forestry in the city’s general fund for fiscal year 2016.
“Tragedy and accidents happen,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose district includes Washington Square Park. “The real question is, is the city doing everything it can to reduce hazards, whether that means inspecting trees or building intersections that are safe.”
Tan, 46, has taken a leave from his job as a computer repair technician at Central Computers on Howard Street. He said he has trouble believing a healthy tree would drop a 100-pound branch on a breezy but otherwise unremarkable afternoon.
“Why would it drop like that if it was healthy?” Tan said. “If they are healthy, would a branch fall?”
Matthew Quinlan, a personal injury lawyer who worked on a lawsuit involving a woman whose car was hit by a tree in Golden Gate Park, said the city probably has an obligation to help Zhou with medical bills.
“The Rec and Park Department is going to say that they did everything properly,” Quinlan said. “But things like this don’t happen absent a condition that was present over time. The tree did not fall in the middle of hurricaneforce winds.”
Canary Island pines are typically stable compared with other trees in the city, said Larry Costello, a tree expert and former member of the Urban Forestry Council, which provides tree-management advice to the city. But even healthy trees can be structurally unsafe, he said.
In a database run by the International Society of Arboriculture, only 23 of 6,000 tree failures in California involved Canary Island pine trees. Of those, eight had branch failures. That is a very low number, Costello said.
“The tree looked to me like it broke off where it attached at the trunk, not in the middle of the limb,” Costello said. “It is an unusual type of failure for that species.”
The Recreation and Park Department has already been at the center of one high-profile legal case this year, a lawsuit filed by a 26-year-old woman who fell 10 feet from a planter at the Palace of Fine Arts and is now unable to walk. The city settled the case in May for $2.25 million.
Tan hasn’t retained a lawyer or filed a claim with the city, a precursor to any lawsuit. He says he’s waiting for officials to make good on covering the family’s bills.
His wife is focusing on rehabilitation, Tan said. A recent X-ray showed her spinal column severed into two pieces, and she has no feeling from her waist down.
“Everything has changed,” Tan said. “We dropped from heaven down to hell.”