DG is not the only town that had to deal with this storm and the damage to their trees. To say nothing of the fact that I KNOW many of those very men were working through the night during an emergency call in to perform their work. These men and women are far from lazy and I will argue that statement with you all day.

Do you realize that the PW department is often amoung the first place the villages and cities go to when they feel they have to reduce personnel costs? What does that mean to you? Things like what you saw happen last week are the result. Too much work for not enough people. Look into it.

Let me tell you about that ‘force’.

The family was at the mall last night (I needed shorts) when the tempest hit, the windows at Nordstrom were literally vibrating. This morning I surveyed the damage in the yard. Not too bad all things considered, but the Ash in the parkway lost some weight and some of the front lot trees shed some thick branches as well. I spent the day trimming back the bundles and setting them up to take to the curb.
A DG work crew came down the street with a a wood chipper the size of a Volkswagon in tow, presumably to clean the arbor debris from the curbs, 5 man crew. I hurriedly dragged the bramble back out to the curb to be mulched by the crew (great timing!). Did I mention they had a wood chipper?? A redwood would have vanished in it’s maw.
One of the workers cut me off and hurriedly explained that they were ‘only taking branches from the parkway trees, nothing else”. I explained that the branches were all from the front yard and how exactly can you tell what came from where? The street looked like Tunguska after the meteor. He waved me off and joined the other junior arborists, hands firmly jammed in vest pockets as they carefully and gingerly picked through the stacked piles of bramble on everyone’s curbs, attempting to identify the carcasses of parkway trees versus victims set deeper in front yards.
To see these men picking through piles of branches and looking skyward to identify whether or not they came from ‘that Ash on the parkway or maybe that Elm in the yard’ while the chipper howled full force and empty in the street seemed to me a perfect metaphor for everything I see wrong in this town.
In the time it took these clowns to decide whether or not to shred the branches in the street, they could have reduced every branch on every curb to paste and still had time make it home for meat loaf night. Instead, they took the lazy route and left the street a mess, this after the neighbors took the time to drag everything to the street and stack it neatly, in the hopes that the village had their back.

9.2% unemployment and somehow these guys have a job. Unreal.

For internet access, there’s the Library (with or without laptop) and the Y plus Carabou, Burger King, McDonald’s, Panera, Starbuck’s, etc.

For heat relief the Village announced a “Cool Shelter”.