Twice in 16 months, college neighborhood resident’s car damaged by falling tree limbs
After a tree limb crushed Deylah Fountain’s new yellow sports car last summer, crews from the city’s forestry division went to work pruning and inspecting trees around the neighborhood.
Last weekend one of those trees, which passed inspection, uprooted. Its trunk landed on a truck and its limbs scratched the white Hyundai Veloster that Fountain bought to replace the yellow one destroyed last year.
Fountain was one of 116 people to file claims with the city last year related downed limbs and trees and one of 20 to receive a settlement. She got $2,647 of the nearly $23,000 the city paid out in 2018, according to documents provided by the city.
The limb that crushed Deylah’s first car was one in a succession of downed limbs and trees on her half-mile-long street, including a tree that fell atop a home, taking out the HVAC system and chimney, tearing a hole in the roof and causing interior cracks.
Modesto spokesman Thomas Reeves said the tree that fell Nov. 23 passed inspection last year. “We are fairly confident the tree was in fact rotted, but the internal rot could not be viewed from the outside, which is why the tree passed inspection,” he said.
City arborists do visual inspections that include checking for fungus and soil disturbance at the base of the tree; loose bark and cracks on the trunk; and broken or damaged limbs or yellowing leaves at the crown.
Because internal rot can’t always be detected from the outside, the city is looking into new technology that uses sound waves to measure decay inside the tree’s trunk and branches.
“This may alert us to internal defects at an earlier stage in the tree’s life,” allowing the city “to make a more informed decision to take a tree out altogether,” Reeves said.
The device, called a Picus Sonic Tomograph, or a tree ultrasound, costs $10,000. Reeves said the city would want to get one for each of the forestry division’s two supervisors, but more research is needed on the fairly new technology.
“Since not many jurisdictions have used it, we are in the process of asking around to gauge success,” he said. “It would be a lot of money on a test, so we’re doing our research now.”
