According to a city announcement, police in Kelowna, Canada, are increasing their efforts to identify and apprehend the person or people responsible for poisoning trees over the past year.
According to a press statement from the City of Kelowna, an unknown perpetrator drilled holes in the trees’ trunks and injected herbicide into them. According to CBC News, the most recent occurrence occurred last week, including a cottonwood tree that stood 18 meters tall at 1055 Sunset Drive.
The largest tree in the park and a significant source of summertime shade, city arborists anticipate it will be dead within weeks.
Infrastructure General Manager Mac Logan said that it’s difficult to comprehend how someone in the community would kill a tree by drilling 25 holes in it and killing them with herbicide.”
He said the notion that someone would deliberately choose to injure their community in this way troubles him tremendously, yet the City will have to ultimately recoup the expense of removing the tree and replacing it.
Logan said it is the third time in less than a year that something like this has occurred, and we must work together to end it.
According to the city’s press statement, city workers are preserving the freshly poisoned tree until it poses a safety risk and must be destroyed.
The Manhattan Drive and Clarence Greenspace areas have both had poisonings in the past. In the second occurrence, six more Aspen trees were poisoned and killed.
According to CBC, Logan also said that taxpayers would be hit hard by the cost of cutting down the tree.
Logan has suspicions about why the trees were cut down, but he doesn’t know for sure. He believes the motivation behind this most recent incident was to increase the visibility of a nearby building.
