You may have noticed this scene driving by the Cornell Cooperative Extension on East Main Street in Batavia:
Several huge oak and silver maple trees have come down out front of the Extension over the past few days—one of them was more than 90 feet tall. We called Kimberly Amey at the Extension to find out what was going on.
It turns out that in a recent windstorm, a branch from one of these gargantuans broke off and like a missile shot down into the ground, getting stuck there. When the folks at the Extension saw the damage and the ease with which that branch came loose and turned projectile, they thought it was time to take a closer look at the trees. As you can see here to the right, some of them were so rotten they were hollow on the inside. There was nothing left to do but chop them down, said Amey.
For the most part the work was routine, but it turned out that inside one of the rotted trunks someone had poured concrete! Amey said that whoever did that thought it might be a safe way to stabilize the tree. She said that was what people used to do with dead trees to keep them from uprooting and impaling downtown structures if the winds got that bad. Well, maybe they weren't going to go sailing around Batavia like that, but you get the point. They could have caused some serious damage to the Extension building, at the very least.
On the bright side, the Extension hopes to soon plant some ornamental flowering trees, like you see in the back of the Extension at the main entrance facing the parking lot. Amey says they're looking for something that would look nice with the building. Here's a photograph of those trees out back that I took this spring.
