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Tree gets a checkup to determine its fate

Risk assessment will be done on arbutus tree on Millstone Avenue in Nanaimo
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Patrick McIntosh, City of Nanaimo urban forestry coordinator, measures the diameter of an arbutus tree on Millstone Avenue. The city will do a risk assessment on the tree to decide if it should stay or be removed. TAMARA CUNNINGHAM/NEWS BULLETIN

Sonic testing will help decide the fate of a more than 100-year-old, “exceptionally large” Nanaimo arbutus tree.

A towering arbutus tree on Millstone Avenue with structural decay will undergo an ultrasound-like test in the next two weeks to find out how far the rot goes.

The arbutus isn’t on the city’s register of heritage trees, but is more than a century old and is prominent in the neighbourhood, according to Patrick McIntosh, City of Nanaimo urban forestry coordinator, who said some people call it the sidewalk tree and kids always play on it. It also has rot, which at a glance of the exterior, is more than 50 per cent of the base and into the sidewalk, McIntosh said.

“It is a beautiful tree and it’d be a shame to lose it but we have to make that decision wisely,” he said adding if it falls one direction it’s on a house and the other, it’s on the road and the density of the arbutus wood is so heavy it could cause a lot of damage.

If it wasn’t such a significant tree, he said the decision would be easy to take it down, but he expects there’d be angry phone calls if they did. City staff will collect physical evidence to show it has done what it can and knows what the situation is.

The city has hired Julian Dunster, a Victoria-based tree expert, to do a risk assessment of the tree involving sonic tomography, which uses moving sound waves to get a digital image of the inside of the tree. The work will cost about $2,000.

  • Related: Heritage tree in Nanaimo’s Old City Quarter assessed for safety

It’s the same technology used to help decide what to do with a catalpa tree in the Old City Quarter, which the city has kept.



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