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At 11:45 a.m., an Overnight Transportation Company truck tore a large limb off of an 80-year-old tree which shades the north side of the Inner Loop between Herring Hall and Wiess College. The driver misjudged the height of the low-hanging limb and of his truck, Campus Police Officer Robert Redman said. The truck's upper frame was also damaged.

Arborist Juan Alejandro witnessed the accident from his groundskeeping truck while he was driving behind the delivery vehicle. Alejandro said the truck hit the limb while trying to pass a car blocking the Wiess side of the street.

Troy Genzer, Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business '97, was the owner of the black Honda which blocked the right side of the road. He had temporarily stopped his car, leaving the hazard lights on, and was inside Herring Hall when the accident occurred. His car had no visible damage. "A couple more feet and I would have had a nice tree ornament on my hood," Genzer said.

Genzer left the scene after the road was cleared enough to allow safe passage. His was the only vehicle allowed to pass through the scene of the accident; the Campus Police detoured traffic approaching the accident onto Alumni Drive.

The delivery truck driver declined to comment on the accident.

Several Facilities and Engineering staff members came to the scene to estimate the extent of the damage and to clear the wreckage of the limb safely from the road. Alejandro and Arborist Jack Spann immediately started clearing the tree limb from the road and the delivery truck, using ropes and chain saws. They could not estimate the damage on the scene but said that the tree consultant would determine the cost by the number of damaged linear feet of the tree. "I can tell you [that] it's not going to be cheap," Spann said.

The full cost of the damage, the clean-up and tree replacement, if needed, will be billed to the delivery truck's insurance company, according to Facilities Manager Eusebio Franco. Franco, Groundskeeping staff and an outside tree consultant will estimate the total bill by Monday.

Franco said that the university pays special attention to the protection and maintenance of its trees. "[Rice University] employs two full-time arborists to care for the campus' tree population exclusively," Franco said. "It takes a long time to grow a tree this size."

"It is a very high [university] priority to keep the old trees healthy and to plant new ones as well," Grounds Superintendent Ron Smith said.

Should the damage to the tree prove fatal, the replacement cost could be as high as $10,000 or $15,000, according to Smith. "[The tree] is really irreplaceable because you can't bring in a tree of that size. [The tree consultants] have to put a dollar amount on it ... and they try to replace it with whatever size of tree you can get in there," he said.

Rice has approximately 4,000 trees on campus, half of which are live oaks.

This item appeared in the News section of the September 5, 1997 issue.