Huge Pine Branch Falls Onto School

A rotted branch peeled off a 75-foot-tall pine tree and slammed onto a Whittier elementary school building early Monday, leaving leaky holes and administrative concerns over why the limb was not reinforced.

Only one person--a teacher preparing for her kindergarten class--was in the eastern wing of Lydia Jackson Elementary when the three-foot-diameter branch collapsed onto the roof about 7:30 a.m., less than an hour before classes were to begin. No one was hurt.

Soggy tiling and sawdust littered the floor after limbs nearly three feet long penetrated two adjacent classrooms and caused at least $30,000 in damage, school officials said. They said the five-classroom building would be left vacant until the roof is fixed and inspectors can determine whether the building suffered structural damage.

Meanwhile, classes doubled up across campus and even took up residence in the school library and an audiovisual resource room. But as Principal Robert Mazzeo noted, the crowding shouldn’t last long: As scheduled weeks ago, the school received a portable classroom Monday intended to help reduce first-grade class sizes.

“What are the odds we’re going to have a new room delivered the day we need one?” Mazzeo asked. The new rooms were being set up and wired Monday afternoon and could be available as early as today, officials said.

Surveying the towering culprit under increasingly heavy rain, workers from California Arborists, the school district’s tree maintenance contractor, noted a large black patch of water-damaged wood just above the limb as the probable cause of the accident. That, they said, and a snapped cable that dangled from the 100-year-old pine.

“The tree’s just old,” supervisor Jeff Norquist said, “old and heavy.” He added that large branches are more susceptible to falling in the rainy season because of the extra weight that comes with added humidity.

As for the cable that until recently had tethered the fallen limb to another that now looms over the southern end of the same building, Norquist said he noticed it was broken just last week.

“I knew the tree was unsafe,” Norquist said. “I told [district maintenance personnel] that the cables were broken and the branches were starting to bow out.”

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On the contrary, said Carmella S. Franco, superintendent of the Whittier City School District. Norquist, she said, had been summoned to inspect the tree Nov. 21, when a district supervisor noticed the cable had snapped. She said the district was waiting for California Arborists to make an estimate to reinforce the tree.

“They had not gotten back to us about the cost of putting the cable in,” Franco said. The tree was inspected in July as part of the district’s new tree maintenance policy, she said, adding that rotted wood is particularly difficult to notice.

The 12-ton pine is scheduled to be removed as soon as the rain lets up, as is another pine that stands several yards north along Painter Avenue.