WaPo's Courtland Milloy: "It’s bad enough D.C.’s trees were gouged. But why did it take so long for people to notice?"

Click on the link below to read the entire Washington Post commentary from Courtland Milloy:

It’s bad enough D.C.’s trees were gouged. But why did it take so long for people to notice?

By Courtland Milloy, Sunday, April 20, 5:40 PM

I hope the law catches up with the District’s rampaging tree gouger. A suspect was arrested last month and charged with carving up more than 100 trees. But he was subsequently released pending a court date and now seems to have vanished.

              

Why were holes and circles cut into so many trees? And why, in this tree-loving city, did it take so long for anyone to notice?

“Everywhere we went, there was more and more damage,” Earl Eutsler, a supervisor with the D.C. Urban Forestry Administration, said Friday. He and a team of foresters recently completed a tree-damage assessment in three neighborhoods that bore the brunt of the defacement: Shaw, Bloomingdale and Logan Circle.

               

Eutsler said the carvings were found on more than 750 trees, far more than originally thought when the defacements were first reported in March.

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