If someone were to, say, set up a catapult in the Berkeley Hills and lob a rock down on the streets of the city every few months, the police in Berkeley would do their best to arrest that person before someone was killed. Yet, a situation with a similar risk to life and property exists on one of our streets, and the city has been repeatedly notified of it but will do nothing about it at all (or next to nothing, but I'll get to that.) There is an old, diseased elm tree standing on Tacoma Avenue near the corner of Colusa. The tree is falling down in sections. Every few months it drops a branch. Some of the branches fall from a height of perhaps 50 feet. It happened a year ago, the branch only hit asphalt, and the city came out and cleared the branch out of the street. Luckily, nobody was injured. Then on Oct. 25, it happened again. This time the branch crushed the hood and fenders of an automobile (as it happens, my automobile.) The force was so great that when the hood was pushed down upon the engine block by the impact of the branch, a bolt punched right through the hood. The damage cost more than $1,800 to repair. If the branch had hit a person instead of an inanimate object, that person would have been grievously injured or killed.
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