See this story at BrooklynDaily.com.<\/p>\n
By Dennis Lynch<\/p>\n
Brooklyn Daily<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
They’re left hanging. <\/p>\n
A Brooklyn man is demanding the city make good on its promise to trim a dangerous, dead tree limb hanging precariously over the sidewalk in front of his mother’s Bay Ridge Avenue home. The ready-to-fall bough is accident waiting to happen, he said.<\/p>\n
“I’m afraid if it falls, it’s definitely going to damage a car or worse kill someone, because its at least an 8–10-inch diameter branch,” said Gravesender Angelo Arena.<\/p>\n
Arena complained to 311 twice — once in April and again in May. The Parks Department responded that it inspected the branch and would “perform work to correct the condition,” but missed its 45-day due dates in both cases, city records show.<\/p>\n
Arena, who said his family has occupied the house on Bay Ridge Avenue near 14th Avenue house for 90 years, believes a fungus killed the branch — and it could claim more of the majestic London planetree if city workers don’t act quickly to amputate the gangrenous limb.<\/p>\n
City workers entirely removed another tree on the block because of a fungus that commonly affects the ubiquitous arbors, and Arena does not want to see the tree near his ancestral home suffer the same fate.<\/p>\n
“Little by little the branches were dying,” he said. “They cut that one down and replaced it, but I’m trying to save this one by doing some pruning.”<\/p>\n
Residents are not allowed to hack city-owned trees on their own unless they pass a 12-hour Citizen Pruner Course with the Trees New York volunteer group, according the Parks Department’s website.<\/p>\n
People injured by falling limbs can file a personal injury claim with the comptroller’s office. Taxpayers had to pay $1.6 million to the family of a woman who was killed by a falling branch while she waited for a bus on Avenue J in 2003. City crews had visited the area eight times to remove a dead tree nearby, but did not take down the bough that ultimately killed the woman, according to the New York Times.<\/p>\n
Bureaucrats cut the Parks Department’s tree-pruning budget sharply in 2010 and restored it in 2013. The city spent roughly $15 million less paying settlements and for court fees following the restoration than it did the year before — when it spent $30 million, according to the comptroller’s office.<\/p>\n
Residents of Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights filed eight tree-related personal injury claims between July 2014 and July 2015, according to the most recent available public data.<\/p>\n
Reach reporter Dennis Lynch at (718) 260–2508 or e-mail him at dlynch@cnglocal.com.<\/p>\n
Comment on this story.<\/p>\n