Newcastle City Council has enacted its emergency plan for Laman Street, as strong winds lash the region. Council officers have identified a public safety risk from the street’s landmark fig trees.
The city library and art gallery have been evacuated and emergency gates have been locked blocking all access to the area.
The long running debate over the future of the figs is due to go before council tonight.
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And, of course, not a branch fell. How ludicrous. Bring on independent assessment so the fences can come down and sanity prevail.
How irresponsible of Council to ask the fire department to attend the street in yet another wind. As if they didn’t have more important things to do than make NCC management’s approach look even more bizarre. What NCC need to do instead of every possible permutation of spin is an updated risk assessment, base on correct information ie that no tree in Laman Street has ever failed. Then we can all get on with more important things.
Evacuations now! This is what is a ‘fiasco’ – our council pulling stunts like this to expedite a totally out of line destruction of apparently beautiful healthy trees. They should be healthy until proven otherwise. Even trees should have a right to ‘innocent until proven guilty?’
These scare tactics are merely another step of a propaganda campaign, against these trees specifically, because the council clearly has a vested interest in seeing these ones go. More correctly, a militant, and getting smaller, portion of the councilors, perhaps being spurred on by other factions, is acting quite desperately now and pulling out all stops to get their own brutal way.
This blatantly fake, frightening figs fiasco is being created entirely by a belligerent part of our council, not the people trying to save them and certainly not the trees. The trees are innocent. They have not done anything wrong. It is all a smear campaign.
All I can gather from this madness is that NCC Officers & a few obssessed Cr’s are determined to avoid independent scrutiny. Cr Cook in my opinion had no right to undermine the NCCs lawful resolution in Dec 2010, by preparing a video (that could be interpreted as a video on behalf of NCC) in opposition to a resolution formally voted & adopted by NCC.