A full-grown cotton tree on the northern footpath along BB Ganguly Street near Lalbazar in central Kolkata got uprooted and crashed into the balcony of a building on the other side of the road on Monday afternoon.
Police said a major accident was averted because incidentally there were no cars or pedestrians at the spot when the tree fell around 1.30pm.
Traffic was restricted for an hour till the trunk was chopped off by disaster management group personnel and the thoroughfare was cleared for vehicles.
No one was reportedly injured and the extent of damage to the building on which the tree fell was also “negligible” because the tree collapsed slowly and came to rest on the balcony of the three-storey building, an officer at Bowbazar police station said.
Many in the neighbourhood who saw the tree fall told The Telegraph that it happened shortly after a CESC team had dug up the footpath and started cable maintenance work nearby.
"This tree had been tilted since Cyclone Amphan (in 2020). Today, it got uprooted soon after CESC personnel dug open a part of the footpath," said Sheikh Hasibul, an employee of a shop close to the spot.
When contacted by this newspaper, the executive director of CESC, Avijit Ghosh, said: “It is unfortunate but it is purely an accident. Most of the work related to CESC involve underground cables. It is unlikely that a full-grown tree will collapse just because of a CESC cable maintenance job in the proximity. Else, there would be many more trees falling every day at the sites where CESC work is going on.”
Ghosh said a low-tension cable maintenance work was going on on BB Ganguly Street on Monday, for which a small part had to be dug up. “It had nothing to do with the tree collapse,” he said.
The cotton tree, a resident of the neighbourhood said, was “at least 40 years old”.
“I have found the tree standing there since my childhood. It bore white fluffy flowers,” said Rameez Rakiv, the owner of a spectacle shop on BB Ganguly Street.
Naturalist Arjan Basu Roy said cotton trees have buttress roots that form a “ligament-like structure” around the tree to support it. “Such roots are vulnerable to cuts and injuries. Even small damage to a part of the roots could prove fatal to the tree,” Basu Roy said.
Basu Roy said timely intervention by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation might have saved the tree. “It is the duty of the KMC (to take care of trees). Timely reduction of weight or partial trimming might have saved it,” Basu Roy said.
A KMC engineer said there was not much to be done after the tree got tilted during Amphan. “It crashed today because of cable work. It could have crashed anyway because of gusty winds and heavy rain,” the engineer said.