If you've driven around the Hessen region of Germany over the past couple of months, there's been an aggressive push by towns to cut heavily upon limbs, and trees themselves....to prevent toppling during ice or snow storms. It's been more aggressive this year than in previous years.
This topic comes up because of an incident over in Bad Homburg which was covered by HR (our regional public TV network). For reference Bad Homburg is about 20 minutes north of Frankfurt, and is considered a 'suburb' of Frankfurt now.
What the police say....is that a crew came up on a street where a fairly big pine tree sat, and the city had assigned the crew the task of cutting the tree down.
The tree in question....a 20-meter spruce. Roughly 65 feet tall, and we might go and admit that spruce trees of this height.....have a fair amount of thickness (it's not a light-weight tree).
Well, in the act of cutting....some attention is drawn upon some 60 year-old local German gal. Even though the area was cordoned off and some kind of security 'guard' was there....she rushed the area as the chainsaw was about half-way into this....to 'save' the tree.
Seconds into this heroic act by the German lady....the tree starts it's fall, and lands on top of her.
What the police say is that she was 'bad-off' (an expression that an American southerner would use), and that it required both the services of a ambulance crew, and regional helicopter-rescue service. Broken bones? Yes.
This is a general dynamic now in dealing with the German public....that a fair number of Germans are out to 'save' something. And the use of common sense is thrown out the door while in the act of 'saving'.
The city now? I would take a guess that they will have to take extreme measures in all tree cutting in the future....maybe with multiple guards and additional fencing....to accomplish a simple tree job.
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