Just after midnight last night, I was woken by a loud noise outside our apartment, so got up to investigate. Our street is lined by very tall and substantial sized trees and one of them decided to shed most of its superstructure...a huge stem (about 2.5 foot diameter and about 50 feet long) had snapped off and plunged to the ground. On the way down, it broke off many other large branches and the whole result was a mess! It flattened three cars, parked legally, two of the large skip type rubbish bins and a couple of market stalls on the opposite side of the street. The street was completely blocked with the debris.
The fire dept teams arrived about an hour after the incident and spent just over an hour checking the site for casualties (none) and cleared up what they could. The sound of a couple of chainsaws, working hard at 3 am was not pleasant.

No one thought it necessary to put up any barriers, close the street or provide any warnings...right now (approx 19 hours after the incident), no one has come to assess the damage, remove the mess, place warning signs etc! What remains of this tree...more than 70 feet high, is in a very fragile state and given the high winds and rain, right now, as I write, I can see this happening again sometime this evening.



Just in case anyone is wondering, my section of the street is about 500 meters long, normally has around 250 vehicles parked along its length...either along the street side, or on the allocated building frontage spaces (on the sidewalk) and it has around 1000 vehicles per day, passing through. Not your typical country lane.

I sometimes wonder when these people are going to join the real world.

Just imagine if this had happened in the middle of the day, things could have been much worse.

That's the scary part...the area is usually busy with both vehicles and pedestrians during the day.
I just checked and the tree (what remains of it), is still standing, but I notice that no one parked close to it last night.

Shall wait and see what gets done today.

Well, at about 4 pm, 3 blokes showed up with a couple of small chainsaws and started to cut up the smaller stuff on the side of the road...still no warning signs or barriers and the traffic was whizzing past them without slowing down. UK Health and Safety people would have had a fit!!!!

The mess they left behind is worse than when they started, so I'm guessing that they will be in the next few days (with a bigger chainsaw) to finish the job...but I won't hold my breath.