Barcelona City Council, based on an external report prepared by a company that is an expert in tree pathologies, although it has not been able to determine the causes of the fall of the date palm tree that on August 6 caused the death of a 20-year-old girl. years on Joaquim Costa street in the Raval neighborhood, has made the decision to proceed with the felling of 540 palm trees that have the same characteristics as the one that caused the accident.
The municipal manager of Parcs i Jardins of the Barcelona City Council, Francesc Jimenez, did not hide his concern at the press conference that the experts were not able to find the causes of the fracture of the Raval palm tree. Hence they take the drastic solution of systematically cutting down 21.5% of the date palms in the city.
In Barcelona there are 2,500 palm trees of which only the date species have caused problems. Exactly 1,224 palm trees in the city are more than five meters high and have already been inspected. Of these, 540 exceed 10 meters and will be felled to be replaced by other tree species, depending on the availability of municipal nurseries. To date, the workers have already cut 308 specimens.
The conclusion of the experts’ report is that the palm tree that caused the deadly incident was healthy, had a normal appearance, showed good growth and no internal defects detected. In addition, in the analysis of the environment, it stands out that the wind does not exert any influence on the trees in that area, nor did the palm tree show any alteration or defect. The oscillation test, issued based on an observation by Google Maps, did not detect any irregular behavior either, just like the verification carried out with a resistograph, the instrument that measures the resistance of wood.
The same analysis, however, presupposes water stress as a possible cause due to “a lack of adaptation during a high period of drought”, which is why the City Council has chosen to increase the irrigation of all the city’s palm trees with groundwater. In the same sense, they conjecture that the fall of the specimen on Joaquim Costa Street is due to the disappearance of a sheet of water that came from a nearby ornamental fountain and that is closed due to the drought decree, a hypothesis that, as recognized Jiménez “could not be corroborated.” Added to this assumption are others such as the excess weight of the ball, the part of the upper cup, but which cannot be considered the causal element. For all this, the person in charge of Parcs i Jardins assures that “I am worried that we have not found the cause, we do not know what we can do with the other date palms” other than to accelerate their replacement, as has been happening since 2014.
Since the incident, the City Council has applied other extraordinary measures, such as increasing the irrigation of these species, the implementation of systematic irrigation and the review of the risk plan to incorporate the felling of palm trees that exceed 10 meters in height. To maintain irrigation with guarantees, Parcs i Jardins operators, in those areas where there is no irrigation network, to minimize the effects of drought, during the day they irrigate with tanker trucks that carry out street cleaning at night. “We have the most restrictive risk plan in the entire State,” said Francesc Jimenez, which undergoes an exhaustive review every two years.
