City negligent in removing dangerous trees

From the NY Post:

Trees labeled by the Central Park Conservancy as dangerous often go untended for months, sometimes with deadly results, records obtained by The Post show.

In one case, a pest-infected tree on the verge of dropping heavy branches onto a pedestrian walkway was slated for removal -- twice -- but nothing was done. In February, seven months after the initial warnings, a limb from the tree struck and killed an Albanian immigrant, Elmaz Qyra.

The unheeded warnings are documented in a voluminous database -- provided only grudgingly after weeks of questioning by The Post -- of 13,867 Central Park trees. The conservancy, a private organization tasked by the city with maintaining Central Park, "didn't even have to give you this report," a Parks Department spokeswoman said. Yet taxpayers will shoulder the cost of the multimillion-dollar lawsuits filed in the two deaths and two serious injuries that have occurred in the park because of falling tree limbs in the past 13 months.

Photo from the NY Times