BRANCHING OUT FALLING LIMBS KEEP TRIMMERS BUSY.

Byline: SUSAN ABRAM Staff Writer

STUDIO CITY -- On quiet Woodbridge Street, a magnolia tree calls for help in the only way it can -- by losing one of its leaf-heavy limbs.

That's when Dale Morgan and his crew from the city's Bureau of Street Services respond to the breakage, one of 12 emergency calls on his morning list that keeps swelling with addresses.

``I've been here for 21 years, and the severity of limb drop was unprecedented,'' George Gonzalez, the bureau's chief forester, said Friday as he watched crews work.

Wasting little time, the crew fed the branch into a woodchipper, which chewed down bark and leaves in seconds, then spit out its chopped remains into a loader.

During a summer when the San Fernando Valley sweltered under three weeks of triple-digit temperatures, it's the trees that have suffered the most.

The increase in limb loss so early in the summer has also strained the 5,700 employees of the Department of Public Works.

Crews in the street maintenance bureau are working 12-hour days, six days a week to respond to the 4,000 calls for service so far. Most of those calls came from the Valley.

Last week, the Los Angeles City Council allocated $850,000 to help pay for the overtime.

Gonzalez said two winters of near-record rainfalls caused trees to sprout heavy growth. Add a blistering summer, and those heavy limbs just gave up.

``For the last five years, we've had a less-than-ideal budget, so we haven't had the ability to trim those trees before this July,'' Gonzalez said. ``Until something bad happens, people tend to forget that trees need regular maintenance.''

The Department of Public Works Street Services Bureau maintains the largest urban forest in the nation, with some 650,000 trees. It operates on a $5 million budget, large enough to trim trees on an eight-year cycle, Gonzalez said.

In addition to pruning and emergency calls, crews also respond to trees suffering from root rot. And they are taught to maintain the more than 1,000 species of trees that coexist together in Los Angeles -- from Siberian elms to Southeastern liquidambars.

Around the corner from Woodbridge, supervisor Allen Cooke and his crew were making quick work of a 30-year-old Modesto ash that had begun to lean over resident Rachel Furman's driveway.

Workers Juan Rubio and Javier Lopez dangled 40 feet up in the air in cherry pickers. Their chain saws sliced through branches with ease as sawdust scattered and wood chips covered their arms and orange shirts. They worked until only a naked tree trunk remained.

Even though tree trimmers are now known as tree surgeons, there's little glamour involved, Cooke said.

Tree surgeons encounter startled squirrels that urinate, twitching rats that scurry into the cherry picker's buckets, and irritable bees. Live electrical wires that crisscross into branches challenge a trimmer's steady hand.

``It's a dirty job,'' Cooke said. ``You can't be bothered by height. You have to work in all the elements -- heat, wind, rain.''

But while the workload has been heavy, crews say those fallen limbs find their way back into the city.

``They come back as mulch, then we use them on medians, in beautification projects,'' said Gonzalez.

``The urban forest is an evolving, living organism,'' he said. ``It's the only part of the city's infrastructure that is always changing.''

susan.abram(at)dailynews.com

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Photo:

Los Angeles city tree trimmers, above, from left, Javier Lopez and Juan Rubio cut heavy limbs from a 30-year-old Modesto ash on Farmdale Avenue in Studio City on Friday.

Tina Burch/Staff Photographer