Council to cut 'nuisance' school trees after damaging bin lorries in Walney
The trees in question were at the edge of Vickerstown School on Walney
The council is set to cut trees on the grounds of a school after its bin lorries suffered damage.
The trees in question were at the edge of Vickerstown School on Walney and were said to have encroached onto the adjoining backstreet behind Latona Street.
But Westmorland and Furness Council said the trees ’caused damage’ to its bin lorries on collection day.
The council put an ‘urgent five day notice’ on its planning portal to say it would carry out works to ‘reduce back’ the ‘damaged’ Willow trees and carry out a ‘crown lift’.
Crown lifting is where the lower branches of a tree are removed to increase clearance between the ground and the lowest branches, hence ‘lifting the crown’ of the tree.
An email from a council arboriculture officer on the planning site, titled ‘Trees causing a nuisance on boundary of school/Latona Street’, reads that she had been contacted by waste services to deal with the ‘encroachment of private trees growing within the Vickerstown School boundary’ and which had been ‘causing damage to council waste vehicles’.
The arboriculture officer added that the ‘minimum requirement’ would be to create 5.2 metres of highway clearance to ‘prevent damage to property’.
The principal arboriculture officer said they had no objection to ‘crown lifting’ of the Willow trees, with ‘all work being in accordance’ with council policy.
The plans read that works ‘would be’ carried out on July 7, which the council said had been discussed with arboriculture officers.
After the plans were submitted on July 7, they were approved on July 13.