MUMBAI: A second-year engineering student from Fr. Agnel's College in
Bandra, Shreya Raut (20), was injured along with some of her relatives after a gulmohar tree at Ram Maruti Road,
Shivaji Park, crashed during a downpour late on Saturday.
Shreya was admitted to
Mahim's Hinduja hospital on Sunday and underwent a spine surgery. Shreya’s father, Bharat, is a former
Shiv Sena shakha pramukh. The Sena controls the civic corporation, which announced that most of the pre-monsoon tree-trimming work had been completed. BMC staffers said they had decided to trim around 90,000 of the 1.2 lakh trees surveyed in the city.
The incident happened when Shreya was returning home after watching a movie at Dadar's Plaza theatre. Locals rushed Shreya and three of her relatives to Dhanwantari Hospital. Shreya was later shifted to Hinduja Hospital. Bharat said Shreya was not scheduled to go for the movie, but decided to join her relatives at the last minute. "Locals promptly rushed them to hospital. She is stable now and we are hoping she recovers soon," said Bharat.
The BMC went into damage-control mode hours after the incident. Trees in the area were chopped and branches pruned on Sunday. However, no trimming of trees was undertaken prior to the monsoon as the lane was narrow, said officials. A garden department official said that the tree that crashed had developed a cavity. There were paver blocks all around the tree, giving no place for its roots to expand. “The gulmohar tree was three decades old. There was no pre-monsoon trimming of the tree as officials said that the narrow lane made it difficult for them to undertake the excercise. We had to shift cars to undertake pruning," said the official.
Environmentalist Stalin D said that a gulmohar tree’s roots don’t not go deep enough, unlike those of other trees that venture almost 6-7 metres into the soil. “The problem with all trees in Mumbai today is that the area around the roots is concretized, thus amputating it literally,” he said. In another tree crash incident on Sunday, a tree crashed at Gaondevi Road in Bhandup, injuring two people. Last month, a 91-yearold-widow died after an branch collapsed on her in south Mumbai.
