A botched tree removal sent a 110-foot-tall Douglas fir crashing onto an east Vancouver street on Sunday afternoon. The tree brought down a nearby power line, startled onlookers and caused Vancouver police to close the roadway for hours.
A man was attempting to remove the tree from a vacant commercial lot at 13714 N.E. 28th St. when it fell onto the road at about 12:30 p.m., according to Vancouver police. No one was injured.
Dinora Betancourt was at a family get-together at her cousin’s house when she noticed the man working on the tree next door. Her family soon moved out to the driveway, a safer distance from the tree.
“We looked out the window and were like, ‘We should get out, because that’s really close,’ ” Betancourt said. She recently had a tree removed from her yard in Woodland, and she said the process looked nothing like what unfolded on Sunday afternoon.
Before the tree hit the pavement, the worker cut deep into its base. He tied a rope to the tree, hooked the rope to a backhoe and tried to pull the tree down and away from the roadway, Betancourt said.
Her family and other spectators watched him for about 45 minutes. The tree swayed to the east, away from Betancourt’s family, then it swung south and landed on the street below. It narrowly missed a van that was traveling along N.E. 28th Street, Betancourt said.
“The guy who was cutting it, he just stood there,” she said. “He didn’t know what to do.”
Following the incident, Vancouver police shut down Northeast 28th Street in both directions, while Clark Public Utilities workers removed the power line from the road and a maintenance worker from Vancouver’s Public Works Department cleared the tree. Police reopened the road at about 3:30 p.m.
The power line that fell supplied electricity to the vacant lot only, so nearby residents didn’t experience a power outage, Vancouver police Sgt. Rod Trumpf said.
As city maintenance worker Ian Crawford prepared to remove the tree, he marveled at its size. Its trunk was 4 feet in diameter.
“That is a big, big tree,” Crawford said. “Those guys are lucky nobody got hurt.”
Property owner George Almajan called the incident an unfortunate mistake. Although it inconvenienced police officers, Almajan stressed that no one was hurt.
“I thank God that everybody was OK,” Almajan said. “It was just an accident, and accidents happen all the time.”
Almajan said he was only on a first-name basis with the man he hired to remove the tree, and he wasn’t sure of the man’s background. He said the man came recommended to him by Vancouver-based Viktory Excavation and Concrete, which Almajan previously hired to demolish a building on his property.
Police are still deciding whether they’ll do anything more with the case.
