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County’s removal of dangerous trees to take ‘several years’

It will probably take “several years” for Maui County to complete its planned removal of 112 dead or dying eucalyptus trees along Piiholo Road, a county spokesman said this week.

In July, the county removed 20 hazardous eucalyptus trees above the Piiholo Ranch Zipline, but more funding and safe access routes must be secured to continue the tree removal, said Maui County Communications Director Rod Antone. He did not provide details on how much funding is required.

“Residents should know that this will be an ongoing process for the next several years, maybe more,” Antone said. “There is no fast fix for this because of the size and volume of trees that need to be removed. We must also consider the safety of the workers doing the removal, and if they don’t have safe access to the area where they’re working so they can remove the trees, then we can’t even begin to authorize the work.”

This approach does not sit well with some area residents, who say the wet winter season is coming and more trees likely will fall, putting lives in danger.

In April, a 70-foot eucalyptus tree came crashing down on a Makawao man’s truck as he was heading home on Piiholo Road. The tree fell just inches away from the cab. The driver, Robert Turner, 32, was treated at the hospital and released.

Antone has said that tree was not on county property before it fell.

“It’s only going to get worse up here,” said area resident Sam Small, who admitted he, too, has eucalyptus trees on his property that need to be addressed. Small said he has been concerned about the trees for at least five years. Trees that were decaying are now dead and starting to break apart.

The Maui Invasive Species Committee has said eucalyptus trees, which are non-native, are being attacked by insects, such as the eucalyptus tortoise beetle and eucalyptus snout weevil. MISC said the trees even are prone to falling in windstorms when healthy.

“Every week or so, there is a big branch that falls down. . . . It falls right on Piiholo Road,” Small said.

“Every morning and every afternoon, it is school bus roulette,” he said. “The county is playing school bus roulette. That school bus goes underneath those trees twice a day.”

Pamela Weber, another Piiholo Road resident, said that she knows the dying trees are not the county’s fault and that not all the problem trees are on county land. But she hopes that the identified dying or dead trees will be removed sooner than several years from now.

“It is a matter of extreme safety,” she said. “Every time I go down that road, I see trees deteriorating even more and more.

“I don’t want to cause trouble for the county, (but) it’s not just for me, there are a lot of people that use that road.”

Weber pointed to a power outage Tuesday and suspected it was due to a tree or branches falling on lines. She was right.

Maui Electric Co. said that around 11:50 a.m. Tuesday a tree came down along Olinda Road, damaging a pole and transformer bank. It caused an outage to about 64 customers in the Olinda/Piiholo area. After repairs were made, crews brought back service to majority of customers by 1:15 p.m.

Later Tuesday, around 2:15 p.m., crews needed to de-energize lines that served about 125 customers in the Olinda/Piiholo area to safely fix a damaged cross arm on a pole along Olinda Road. Power was restored to customers by 2:50 p.m.

MECO spokeswoman Shayna Decker said that there have been 32 tree-related outages this year in the Olinda/Piiholo area. Decker added that tree species are not identified in the utility’s records because there are various tree types in the area.

Both Weber and Small questioned the site chosen for the removal of the first 20 trees, which they say were not the most dangerous. The trees were near Piiholo Ranch Zipline, where tourists travel, and along a property for sale, they pointed out.

Antone said “the county had to remove those that were easiest to remove first, which were the ones we had the best access to.” The county has been working with the Baldwin family (which owns Piiholo Ranch) to get a right of way entrance to its property and family members have been very cooperative, he said.

“They have sat down and met with our departments regarding this matter, but there are some details that still need to be hammered out,” Antone said.

An official with Piiholo Ranch could not be reached for comment Friday.

Tree removal in the Piiholo/Olinda area above Makawao is much more difficult than removing trees in Kahului or Wailuku, Antone said.

“Access is a challenge and money is a limitation, but we’re working on both as best we can,” he said.

* Melissa Tanji can be reached at mtanji@mauinews.com.

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