Kennedy Grove: 2,000 trees have been cut down or uprooted as part of ‘a road project’
Published:
July 22, 2014 at 8:37pm
Newsbook reports that Transport Malta has chopped down a thousand trees at Kennedy Grove and uprooted another thousand as part of “a road project”.
The Maltese war on trees continues, and the government leads the way.
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http://www.newsbook.com.mt/artikli/2014/7/22/mal-2-000-sigra-titnehha-minn-kennedy-grove.20357
Where is Astrid?
She told them it’s OK.
If this report is true then the present government is even worse than I had figured out it would be.
This is impossible. I do not mean the tree story, but that the government is even worse than I had surmised.
[Daphne – Rest assured that the report is true. Newsbook is owned and run by the same media organisation that owns and runs RTK radio, that of the Catholic Church in Malta.]
It’s true, Kennedy Grove is history. It will soon be called Kennedy desert road.
Or ‘Kennedy Grave’. My heart aches each time I drive by and I see those bulldozers in the fields beneath the road and flattening everything in front of them.
Who’s interested in Kennedy Grove? It was a Nationalist government project under the Borg Olivier administration. Similarly, the Marsaskala Family Park opened 2 years ago. And the same attitude by a Lejber government has been shown towards the rehabilitation of the Maghtab landfill which the Mintoff government created and ‘developed’.
Where is Astrid and her tree-hugging gang?
Well if she’s been cut down to size too there won’t be much left considering there wasn’t much to start with.
The Ministry says that Astrid’s FAA approved this.
Astrid got her medal last December.
And where is Pamela who roared so much about the removal of trees in front of Auberge de Castille .
What can I say – I suppose MEPA knows best? Whatever next.
As in so many other spheres, what previous governments built, this government destroys.
Was it so hard to simply relocate them elsewhere?
[Daphne – They relocated a thousand, we’re told here. But that’s hardly the point. Kennedy Grove was one of Malta very few stands of trees. A stand of trees has ecological and (to humans) psychological benefits that individual, randomly distributed trees do not. A stand of trees creates a mini ecosystem that is destroyed when the trees are dispersed.]
Worse still, relocation of trees is not the relatively simple affair that the ‘relocating authorities’ would have us believe. It needs specialist expertise and intense, sustained, follow-up efforts in order to attain a reasonably high survival rate. In our case, the methods employed are crude in the extreme and, of the comparative few that survive the process, just about all die within a dismayingly short time.
Get rid of 2000 trees so that changes to the road network do not irk Joseph Muscat’s constituents and neighbours in Burmarrad. Makes so much sense.
This is tantamount to an ecological disaster in Malta.
Anything this government does is money related and here is further proof.
The average tree weighs around 2000 kilos.
Firewood costs around 5 euros for a 20 kilo sack.
A tree is worth 500 euro as firewood.
1000 chopped trees are worth 500,000 euros as firewood.
Follow the drift?
Now follow the trail, someone is about to make that much money in hard cash, tax and VAT free.
What does Herr Flick think about this? Isn’t this a “rape of the environment?”
How about this: “rape of trees wont be tolerated”?
http://www.independent.com.mt/mobile/2013-05-06/news/environment-minister-warns-rape-of-trees-wont-be-tolerated-1530986498/
[Daphne – Rape of trees! Honestly. Who rapes a tree? And is there a name for this kind of sexual preference?]
Daphne, in a country with so many sexually deprived people, anything goes.
Dendrophilia
Yes, apparently there is a name for sexual preference for trees. It’s called “dendrophilia.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrophilia_(paraphilia)
Worse than savages!
‘And is there a name for this kind of sexual preference?’
Logging perhaps?
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Logging
Well you did ask.
I would have delved further into the case rather then just churn out a sensational headline that only serve to mislead people. Apart from the fact that the mentioned 2000 trees were located along the whole stretch of the Coast Road, not just within Kennedy Grove, the reality is that thousands of taxpayer’s money and hundreds of men hours are being dedicated to limit the damage and the environmental impact of a badly needed infrastructural upgrade to the said road. FAA and tree experts are indeed being involved in every step of the way (hence their silence) to ensure that no tree is damaged unnecessarily and to ensure that the trees that were earmarked for transplanting are pruned, moved and taken care of properly to ensure their survival. On a side note, trees that are evasive (like Acacia, Eucalyptus etc), half of the trees on site, actually do more harm then good to the Maltese environment. They shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
[Daphne – There are no trees along the Coast Road. There is rocky coast on one side and private houses and a landfill site on the other. The trees that have been removed are located on either side of a very short stretch of road and are, yes, part of Kennedy Grove.
The headline is not misleading but factual: 2000 trees have been removed from Kennedy Grove, a thousand of them destroyed.
The road is fine and did not need that ‘infrastructural upgrade’. It is not used by heavy traffic and there are never any jams there because it is the feeder road to Bugibba only from Sliema and St Andrew’s and people from Sliema and St Andrew’s do not go to Bugibba.
As somebody whose house overlooks the Burmarrad road, and who uses that road frequently, I can tell you that the Burmarrad Road is the main feeder road for Bugibba and that it is jammed solid during peak hours for traffic to the entertainment zone, including lunchtime on weekends. This is because the sort of people who like going to Bugibba drive across the centre of the island, across the Rabat road, bypassing Mosta to the Targa Gap roundabout and then straight down the Burmarrad road. I know because I see them: the traffic on Sunday is a solid jam from the Rabat Road to the Mosta/Targa Gap roundabout down the Burmarrad road right up to the St Paul’s Bay roundabout. The Kennedy Grove stretch, meanwhile, is a clear run.
The ‘upgrade’ is not an upgrade at all but a plan to divert the heavy Bugibba traffic from the Burmarrad road – I won’t link it to anybody’s personal vested interest and the wish for a quiet weekend without traffic – to the Telgha ta’ Alla u Ommu/Salina Road, the outlet for which is precisely the Kennedy Grove area.]
Can’t we have a massive beach in the Sawt, built on reclaimed land, with Chinese sand or whatever, and relocate Piscopo tal-barbikjus? North or South, what the poplu Malti really wants is a few square feet of barbequable sand.
What are “trees that are evasive”? Are they related to the prime minister?
Lets get things straight. One, this is an EU project that was planned and applied for under the previous administration. If this administration stopped or tweaked the project beyond its original scope, Malta would have lost 50 million euros. Indeed the project is mostly being implemented as originally planned. PN? PL? Doesn’t make a difference.TM steamed ahead. The EU is its paymaster not the national government.
Two, the scope of the project is not primarily to divert or ease traffic but to almost exclusively improve the safety of the road. Till now not a year passed by without the Coast Road claiming lives.
Three, Newsbook indeed got wrong. The 2000 trees were located along the whole stretch of the Coast Road, not just within Kennedy Grove. But yes a few tens were located within.
Four, just because you never noticed the trees along the Coast Road, it doesn’t mean they weren’t there. Indeed there were hundreds, many of them not bigger then a mid-sized bush. I will explicitly point to the Tamarix tree, of which there were hundreds. This tree doesn’t grow very much and many times takes the shape of a mid-sized bush. It blends easily with the Maltese landscape and people hardly ever give it any notice. But it is highly protected and indeed down to the tiniest sampling of this species was classified as a ‘tree’ and transplanted accordingly
Ah! Six, a thousand trees were uprooted because they were classified as evasive and are going to be replaced by indigenous trees instead.
May I gently point out that the word you probably meant to use is “invasive”. Unless the trees you speak of grew legs to get out of the way of the bulldozers, “evasive” doesn’t really make any sense in the context.
Why do the Maltese hate trees?
In an arid land in need of shade from the punishing sun one would think that trees are a blessing.
They say trees bring vermin.
Vermin are not caused by trees.
The Black Forest and the mighty forests of British Colombia and Washington state should be crawling with vermin, but they are not.
Vermin are caused by over-population in a crowded small area and plenty of good eats for them because of filth and garbage strewn about in a year round warm climate and unhygienic practices like Maltese burial practices in cemeteries and shallow sanitary sewers with poor upkeep.
I don’t get it; maybe I have lived in North America for too long to figure out their mentality.
This disaster was planned by the previous PN government and executed by this ‘progressive’ PL government… they both pander to the ‘toroq ahjar biex tasal malajr bil-karozza’ lobby,
It’s worse than that, actually.
Some four years ago, several schoolchildren (one of mine included) planted trees – a thousand or so, I believe – in a site next to Kennedy Grove, in a project spearheaded by George Pullicino. (My daughter still considers it “her” tree, and enjoys seeing how it’s grown over the years the few times we drive by.)
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20101121/local/1-000-trees-planted-at-salina-this-weekend.337111
That site is now also the subject of a controversy – Evarist Bartolo is planning to uproot the trees to make way for a new school. What greater education for children than to make them aware of the environment, rather than destroy part of the environment to which they feel they have contributed?
U Leo Brincat jonghos. Ta parir il-kumitat tas-sigar li kien waqqaf Leo jew dan stahba wkoll….?
SHAME ON YOU. Where are the NGOs, have they been shushed up now.