Hi, my name is Blair Glenn. I am an ISA’s certified Arborist.
In 1992, I was called out to Blainey Plaza in downtown Saratoga by the city to look at a tree that was indeed toppling over. I have a whole series of before and after pictures. This is a current picture that I just hook today in 2008, and you can see the comparisons on how the trees have grown, and some of the changes. It is pretty remarkable.
The city was alerted to the problem by the post that is up against the trunk. The day before this happen, here was about six inches of air space between that post and the wood on the trunk of the tree.
I had to rapidly take off a lot of weight on the tree before it fell over. It was leaning and there was quite a gap underneath the root poll. I took off 7,000 lbs of branches for the weight to up the scales at the dump. We also had to install a prop at the base of the tree to keep it stabilized.
There is a close up of the - there is like an electrical box. It was vertical and it was about six inches of air space between and it is pushing on it. That is back in 1992 and today, you can see what is left of the stake there and the trunk is gotten considerably larger.
This is an interesting shot because not only do you see the changes in the buildings around there as well as the trees, but there is a liquid amber in the fore ground that was fairly young at the time and on the next picture, you will see how much its grown.
There is that liquid amber. Kind of dominates the whole picture now.
That is where the Starbucks is downtown in Saratoga.
The city has completely remodeled this whole area, it is entirely different. It was actually difficult to take some of these pictures because registering anything in the picture was difficult because everything looks different. And, that is what it looks like today.
We are going to mount this A frame structure up solidly against the trunk of the tree in I put two big threaded lag screws in there to stabilize it and a through rod, and 16 years later, it is still in there solidly and it is interesting to see the growth of the bark. The cambium enveloping this post.
This is the other adjacent zoned pine. The sign is no longer there.
A lot of changes but the tree looks very similar. It does not change a whole lot. It is probably oh maybe two to three inches in diameter bigger than it was 16 years ago.
That was a good shot. You can see exactly how much we had to take off to reduce the weight. We took off so many branches but amazingly, it is filled in and there we are today.
It is kind of interesting that brick building over there is -- if it is still brick, it is been painted over. It is kind of a shame and that the -- there is the corner lot where the Starbucks is today. Lots of changes, lots of changes.
It was a very rainy day when this tree is started to topple and the root ball was thoroughly saturated. The winds came along and the weights and everything combine and caused the entire root ball to start lifting. It was so raised in one area that I was able to put my arm up underneath the root ball and we were organic mode.
And that is about as close as I can get to the same picture. The arch ways are new edition that used to be located across the street. And there is what the post look like in 1992, and now, there are bushes in front of it.
As far as I am aware, I have been told that these trees where planted in 1918. There is a few assorted large Italian stone pines in Saratoga. There is one over at the Lutheran church over on the left hand side on Saratoga Avenue. It is an enormous tree, and there was one over behind the library out in the orchard which failed a few years ago, but I believe their all planted about the same time in 1918.
These are real landmark trees that bring us to the entrance of Saratoga, downtown Saratoga and it is something that we really need to consider preserving. We have to do the best we can for these tree. We have to maintain the growing space to the best of our ability, but we also have to monitor these trees to make sure we do not have any weaknesses deve
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