Dear Editor:
During the windstorm, two eight-inch diameter trees blew down on West Vancouver municipal property abutting the parking lot for the building at 545 Clyde Ave.
(On Thursday, Sept. 10), shortly after 9 a.m. when I arrived at my office in the building, there was a West Vancouver municipal crew here, dealing with the removal of these two small trees.
The crew consisted of seven persons, including three flaggers, two tree cutters and two equipment operators.The rolling equipment they brought with them consisted of: one bucket truck, one pickup truck, one log chipper, one log chip carrier and one dump truck. By 9:30 a.m. they were at work.
At 10:30 a.m., having chipped up the branches and deposited a log in the parking lot, the flaggers surrounded the log with safety warning tape. Then the personnel and the equipment left the scene.
They returned at 11:15 a.m., and brought in another dump truck, in addition to the equipment described above, towing a trailer on which sat a front-end loader. They proceeded to unload the front-end loader, presumably to pick up the small log and put it in one of the dump trucks.
I wondered, as I watched out my window, why they didn’t just assign two of the workers to lift up the log and put it in the truck. They must have read my mind, and they carried the log over to the dump truck and threw it in. The next job was to drive the front-end loader back onto its trailer and secure it. The job was completed by 11:25 a.m. The workers then had a chat and by 11:35 a.m. they left.
I would guess that the entire operation — to remove two small trees — would have cost the West Vancouver taxpayers the equivalent of what I paid in property taxes last July. I estimate that I could have cut down and bucked up the two small trees by myself in an hour — tops.
A commercial tree service could have done the job in 30 minutes, with a crew of two.
Richard Baker
West Vancouver
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