They’re left hanging.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
