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The Trouble With Trees

The trouble with trees is that sometimes they fall.

It was my 85th birthday and my wife had gone to the market to shop for fixings for a celebratory evening dinner. Then I got a knock on our door. As he entered our home, our family friend exclaimed, Jane is OK! It seemed like an eternity until she called. Someone had retrieved her cell phone from the floor of our car. The car had been totaled – completely destroyed by a falling tree as she drove south on Leetes Island Road in Branford. She had pushed open the door and walked away with chards of windshield glass still to be removed from her face but otherwise only bruised.

Fortunately, she had been wearing sunglasses. More miraculously, I was not in the passenger seat, since the roof of our car totally collapsed on that side.

A member of Branford’s EMT told her how lucky she was and she should buy a lottery ticket.

I am writing this letter in an effort to get the word out to Branford residents. The town of Branford does not have a state-certified tree warden or an urban forest management plan.

Lacking both, mitigation of the risk of a recurrence of our experience (or worse) without the application of a science-based discipline is a helter-skelter proposition.

On March 8, the Branford Representative Town Meeting will consider the adoption of a revision to the town code to partially remedy the above issues, but the lack of an urban forest management plan still looms.

Jerry Shaw

Branford