By Juan Montoya
More than a half-dozen Washingtonian (Sonoran) palm trees have been uprooted from Central Boulevard by Brownsville Public Utilities Board crews (and some hired help, with talaches and shovels) this past week.
The tall swaying palms that provoke the muses of poets and wannabe tropical-setting gonzo writers apparently were swaying too close for the electric power lines for PUB's comfort. So the utility decided to remove them from the right-of-way. The famous tree digger was not used because of the small space between the curb and the resaca and the existence of other utility lines (telephone and gas) under the ground.
After getting bounced around a few offices at the PUB, we finally spoke with real-live human being Frank Matus, who said the plam trees will be donated to the City of Brownsville for replanting projects elsewhere. These particular plams will be stored with the city forester and distributed as needed.
If you are a private homeowner and have trees growing too close to power lines, don't take the risk of getting electrocuted and call PUB to give you a hand.
Matus said that if a palm tree or other type of tree cannot be saved and must be cut down to prevent it from interfering with primary voltage ines, it is eligible for replacement through the PUB's Trade-a-Tree Program.
This program, he said, does not apply to trees in secondary lines.
The Brownsville PUB, working with the City of Brownsville, will remove the existing tree interfering with the primary line, clean up the debris and provide a replacement tree approximately five(5) feet tall, placed in the customers yard by nursery.
The tree must be planted the proper distance from the primary line to ensure that it will not later interfere with the line. A wide variety of trees (at least 16 varying from huisache to sabal palms) are available as replacements through this program.
Residents who think they may qualify for the Trade-a-Tree program can call Matus at 983-6258.
2 comments:
Not everybody takes advantage of our tree digger couple of weeks ago the Conquistador apartment brought down a coupe of palm trees that could have been replanted somewhere else. guess they did not want to bother going through the paperwork of requesting the digger and chose to just chop it up and dump their palm trees.
Back in 2004 the University did the same thing when putting down sidewalks on East Elizabeth in front of the old Howard Johnson. The contractor just cut them down and got rid of them hoping nobody would alert the city, but sure enough someone advised the city of the palm tree massacre. I do not recall if the Herald had a followup to the story of the contractor cutting them down without advising the city.
Slowly but surely, we might be getting the city and PUB in a "Think Green" state of mind. At least I hope this is the case. There are cities in Texas and elsewhere that would love to have the flora (and fauna) we seem to take for granted.
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