I posted this elsewhere, but according to a quick Google it’s up to $18k per tree and from the images I found, it’s 5 trees. $90k is couch cushion money to Universal. They DGAF about fines.
My wife is a (seasonal) arborist, when I saw the news yesterday I decided not to show it to her because she already struggles with how people treat trees and this would just leave her angry.
Even I, a layperson, saw the job that was done and thought to myself “holy shot they mutilated those trees”.
For real. These trees represent decades of investment by the city to provide essential services (shade, clean air, etc.) that has now been permanently damaged by these fuckheads. And their “justification” is the most dishonest and despicable part. As an arborist I can tell you that no reputable arborist would trim these trees this way. Ignoring the legality, trimming them this way makes them more dangerous, not less, and any arborist should know that. Shame on them.
I don’t know much about ficus, but I know if someone did this to a silver maple or a ginkgo, it’d be a death sentence for that tree. There’s almost no foliage left to even photosynthesize with, and the surface area of the cut ends is massive; it’ll take months to seal up those wounds, during that whole time, the tree is losing water. If it managed to survive just the environmental issues (water, heat, light, etc), it’ll be extremely vulnerable to diseases and pests. Unless ficus are the tarragon of the tree world, they look to me like they’re doomed. Universal should have just cut them down, for all that.
Ficus is very tough so I do expect they will survive but they will be permanently deformed and more likely to drop branches in the future due to poor structure and injuries that may decay before healing properly.
You really love to see yet another unsuspecting victim accidentally invoke the wrath of tree law. Really makes that old episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force (S1E2) hit different. Ain’t no joke!
