A full-grown deodar tree planted along a footpath on Harish Mukherjee Road crashed on a Toyota Fortuner injuring two persons inside it on Friday afternoon, when there was neither any squall nor gusty wind.
One of the two suffered a fracture in the hand, police said.
Nilanjana Bose, 42, a resident of Prince Ghulam Mohammad Shah Road and the owner of the car, was in the back seat. At the wheel was Subhas Shaw, 48.
Both were taken to SSKM Hospital, from where Bose was discharged after treatment. Shaw, who fractured his hand, was shifted to a private hospital.
An eyewitness said the Fortuner was passing under the tree when it suddenly crashed.
Police officers said it was a lucky escape as the farthest branch of the tree fell on the balcony of a two-storey house on the other side of the road. Because of that the tree did not fall on the car with its full weight.
“Had the tree trunk fallen on the car with all its weight, the consequences could have been more serious,” said an officer of Kalighat police station.
A similar incident was reported in the city a few weeks ago when a woman and her father, travelling through SP Mukherjee Road, had a close shave when a cotton tree collapsed on their car.
Such incidents of trees getting uprooted without any apparent reason such as squall come as a reminder of what many naturalists have been saying for long.
“Too much concretisation makes the roots difficult to spread, weakening the tree from the roots. Unscientific pruning and wrong choice of avenue plantation, too, result in such accidents,” said a city-based naturalist.
“In many cases trees planted in neighbourhoods cannot be trimmed from all directions because of their proximity to houses. In such cases, the crown of a tree is trimmed only from one side, leaving the other side heavy and drooping,” said the naturalist, citing this as one of the reasons for the untimely fall of a tree.
Monsoon traits in city rain
The drizzle across the city since late Friday afternoon had the characteristics of a monsoon shower, the Alipore Met office said.
The Met office will analyse the weather condition and then declare on Saturday if monsoon winds have entered south Bengal, said G.K. Das, the director of the India Meteorological department, Kolkata, on Friday. “We will see how much it rains through the night, the depth of the moisture and whether it came from the Bay of Bengal or Bangladesh before we can declare that monsoon has entered south Bengal.”
Das added that even if the monsoon arrived now, the rain would be light to moderate as no system has developed over the Bay that can bring heavy rain.
The Met office forecast a generally cloudy sky for Saturday with the possibility of rain or thundershower.