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# Winning the war against trees
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/winning-the-war-against-trees-editor/
- Published: 2006-06-06T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T18:15:51.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*By Victor Fresco Santa Monica*

In the next few weeks the city of Santa Monica is going to forcibly remove dozens of its oldest residents. I’m talking about our towering, urban forest of eucalyptus trees. The city plans to cut down 77 of them. None are dead or even dying. No hearings were held to get residents’ opinions. There isn’t time, I was told by a city official. You see, the trees could attack at any moment.

The city is concerned that a branch might fall from one of them and kill somebody. But how often do trees kill people? It turns out one’s chances of being killed by a falling tree or branch are so remote that the National Safety Council, which monitors such things, doesn’t even track it. The closest thing they do track is one’s chance of dying from “being struck by, or striking, an object.” That’s any object. And the chance of that, in any year, is one in 313,918.

Let’s pretend that of all the objects that strike and kill people, 10 percent of them are tree limbs. That seems ridiculously high, but we’ll give the benefit of the doubt to those who think plants are a menace. Even then, that would put your chance of death by tree in the one in 3,139,000 category.

By way of comparison, your chance of committing suicide is only one in 9,300\. That means you’re 350 times more likely to kill yourself than have a tree do it for you.

You’re also over seven times more likely to die by “falling from a bed, chair or furniture” (one in 423,000); six times more likely to be done in by “slipping, tripping or stumbling” (one in 487,000), and over four times more likely to be killed by a dog (one in 700,000). Don’t tell the city or they might take away your legs, furniture and dogs. At a city presentation — purely informational, not to solicit resident input — I asked how likely it was that one of these doomed giants would drop a major branch. No one knew. It could happen tomorrow, it could never happen. These trees have been here for decades, but suddenly there’s no time to talk about their destruction? One of them dropped a branch on a car, injuring the occupants, I was told. That’s tragic, but one branch hitting one car, out of the millions, only makes the point that the city is overre-acting to an almost non-existent threat.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 6, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/060606.pdf?ref=smdp.com)