Mumbai : In the five days Mumbai witnessed heavy rainfall — since Thursday night — close to 400 trees collapsed across the city, claiming the lives of three people in separate incidents.
The highest number of trees fell on Friday, when the city experienced about 300 mm of rainfall in a single day.
The latest incident was recorded on Tuesday, when a tree fell on two people in Prabhadevi in Dadar.
Both were rushed to the KEM hospital immediately. One of them, a 25-year-old man, was declared dead on arrival, and a woman aged 30 is recovering from her injuries.
Niranjan Shetty, Member of Tree Authority, told the Free Press Journal that for the past two years the civic body has been tendering contracts for chopping precarious trees around the city. After the 2005 floods, it was the BMC gardeners who would chop trees and the contractors would only gather the remains, but this has changed in the past two years, coinciding with a rise in the incidence of tree collapse.
He said, “The BMC needs to figure out who is responsible for so many trees falling in such a short span. The contractor, of course, has done shoddy work: he is supposed to chop all weak trees before the monsoon. However, every ward has a Junior Tree officer, who should inspect every tree in his ward. Since this officer is a horticulturist, he will realize which trees have weak trunks, if he does his job well. So, it is also the responsibility of the Junior Tree Officer.”
However, Shetty also attributed the tree collapse to excessive concretization that hinders root growth.
