Authorities arrested a man last week for vandalizing dozens of trees in the Bloomingdale and Truxton Circle neighborhoods in Northwest, but it looks like the damage he allegedly committed was far worse than it initially appeared.
John Thomas, a spokesperson with the Urban Forestry Administration, tells DCist that he estimates the man damaged 752 trees. “Trees on parks and private property were damaged,” he says. Trees all the way from Truxton Circle to New York Avenue were damaged with deep, circular marks carved out of the middle of them. Some trees had more than eight or nine of these damaging marks.
Thomas says the UFA first got an email last Monday afternoon saying that “hundreds” of trees in the sender’s neighborhood were damaged, but the person didn’t provide an address. Soon after, they received more emails alerting them to tree damage in the Bloomingdale and Truxton Circle areas.
The UFA then turned to Twitter and tweeted that, if anyone sees damaged trees or someone vandalizing trees, to call 311 to report it. The Metropolitan Police Department saw the tweet and Thomas says he took them out to the areas of damaged trees to alert them to the situation. “The next morning, MPD caught him,” Thomas says. “They pulled up on a guy chiseling away on a tree and arrested him right there.” Thomas says it was “great agency communication” between the UFA, MPD, the media, and the community that helped authorities catch the tree vandal swiftly. But although authorities caught the suspect quickly after the incident was reported, he still caused a lot of damage. (MPD says they’re charging the suspect with destruction to D.C. property but has not released any more information about him).
“Some of [the trees] are really small, like two to three-inches in diameter and those are almost fatally damaged,” he says. “Others have multiple wounds—those I’m a little more worried about.” Although NBC4 initially reported that the vandal could have caused thousands of dollars worth of property damage, Thomas says the damage is “hard to quantify.” It’s a lot of man hours from the UFA to monitor the damaged trees and many of them could develop weak spots as they grow, causing many problems later on. “A big gust of wind during a storm could cause a weak spot to crack,” he says.
For now, though, the UFA is closely examining the damaged trees and determining which ones need to be removed. “The damage is significant enough that there’s going to be major problems,” he says. “It’s 752 trees.”
You check out a detailed storymap of the damaged trees here.
