Eucalyptus Trees to Be Cut Down for Project : Simi Valley: Grove will make way for a 93-house subdivision. Neighbors have mixed feelings but are fed up with vacant lot.

Sick, old and in the way, 97 majestic blue gum eucalyptus trees in Simi Valley will fall beneath the chain saw in two weeks to make way for a 93-house subdivision.

Neighbors of the 37-acre lot at the corner of Alamo Street and Tapo Canyon Road said Thursday they wish the trees could stay. But they say they are glad the new subdivision will crowd out the hard-drinking homeless people and partying teen-agers who sometimes hang out there.

“I’m saddened by the trees being cut down, but I’m elated they’re going to be cut down because we have teen-agers doing drugs in there,” said Pat Tripodo, 40, who lives on neighboring Eucalyptus Street. “I kind of like having a field at the end of the street--it’s just a bit of country for us in the middle of the city.”

The 50- to 70-foot trees are home to hawks and a play area for neighborhood children, said Pam Stalker, 36, of Eucalyptus Street. But she said it is time they were cut down and houses built to spare neighbors the spectacle of homeless people defecating in the field.

Some 60 years ago, citrus ranchers planted the grid of fast-growing trees around their rectangular groves to shield crops from the punishing Santa Ana winds.

But when water got too expensive citrus ranching was abandoned and the eucalyptuses were left to fend for themselves, said Michael Kuhn, Simi Valley senior planner.

Then came the eucalyptus long-horned borers.

This hungry larval form of a long-antennaed Australian beetle hitchhiked to Southern California aboard a boatload of eucalyptus logs about 10 years ago and quickly infested trees around the region, including many at Alamo and Tapo Canyon.

The borers are the only known enemy of the eucalyptus, but they are relentless, Kuhn said.

They have gnawed through the trees’ sheaths of living bark and sent many of the lofty hardwood trees spiraling toward death, he said.

He pointed to the meandering channels that borers chewed through the bark of a toppled tree, now reduced to a dead stump after loggers carted the rest of it away.

Other infested trees still stand around the dusty field, their sickle-shaped leaves gone brown and their tops fallen bare.

Even without the borers, Kuhn said, falling branches and the incessant litter of peeling bark make the eucalyptus trees too dangerous and impractical for housing projects.

“You can’t preserve them in the back yards and side yards because they’re self-pruning,” he said. “They’re very trashy; they drop big limbs from high up in the tree and they fall over.”

The city plans to save a dozen uninfested blue gum and red gum eucalyptuses that line Alamo Street, irrigating them to thwart the worms’ attack, Kuhn said.

But the rest are as good as dead, Kuhn said, adding: “There is no defense against (the borers). You can’t spray for them, there’s no birds that eat them. They’re insects from Australia so there’s nothing that recognizes them as food.”

At first, neighbors campaigned in public hearings on the project to save the trees, said Eucalyptus Street resident Robert Bridges, 35.

But then the neighbors learned that the trees were pretty much doomed to be bug food.

“I hate to see them go, they’re gorgeous,” Bridges said. “I’ve got three boys, and they love playing out there. But I guess it’s time.”