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A garbage truck jumped the curb on Seventh Avenue on Monday morning, killing one of the stately London plane trees and cracking a large section of the sidewalk.
The Sanitation Department snowplow had been removing the remains of last week’s blizzard at around 8:45 am when the vehicle jumped the curb — scattering school-bound kids and their horrified parents.
“I heard a bang,” said Kate Ogg, who was walking her son when the accident occurred. “I was lucky that I had stopped to make a call [a half-block down]. We might have been hurt!”
Ogg did manage to photograph the carnage — in which the tree is plastered up against the Sanitation truck like a pilot fish clinging to a shark — and send the arborcidal evidence to The Brooklyn Paper.
Witnesses said that the driver of the truck managed to stop the vehicle’s progress before more damage could be done.
“It looked like the tree hopped on the side truck like it wanted a ride,” joked a worker at the Park Slope Copy Center, as he swept up splintered wood.
Jokes aside, the victim was said to be at least 20 years old with no signs of rot. It was a specimen in perfect condition.
The driver will not be charged, according to a Sanitation Department spokeswoman.
In fact, the spokeswoman, Kathy Dawkins, blamed the victim, stating that the tree was too close to the street.
It’s certainly not the first incident of arborcide — involuntary or not — in Brooklyn.
Last year, a Columbia Street man complained that workers murdered his tree.
And later that same year, city officials killed nine trees along the Fulton Mall in Downtown as part of a beautification project.
And the mother of all arborcidal incidents was the 2008 public art project, “New York City Waterfalls,” which sprayed brackish mists up and down the DUMBO and Brooklyn Heights waterfront, killing trees at the River Cafe and on the famed Promenade.
None of the murderers has been brought to justice.
©2010 Community Newspaper Group
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