Residents along the Chiang Mai-Lamphun road say they are living in fear of the next falling tree, after a yang na more than 20 metres tall came down across the road in a thunderstorm and missed a passing motorbike by a fraction of a second. One neighbour has already sold up and left.
The tree fell in Nong Hoi subdistrict, Mueang district, on the evening of the storm. Officers from Nong Hoi Subdistrict Municipality cut up the trunk the next morning to clear the road for traffic and the shops nearby. Our team found the inside of the trunk had rotted away almost completely, which is the likely reason it snapped.
Traiphop Thatsana, who runs a basketware shop on the road and has been there more than 50 years, said branches have dropped on the neighbourhood before, though never with much damage. He admitted he still worries a big tree will land on his shop one day. This time it wasn’t his, which he called lucky. He wants the authorities to check the health of the trees far more often.
He added that the house next door has taken several branch hits to its roof over the years, badly enough that the roof was wrecked. With elderly relatives living there, the owners got frightened, sold the house and moved somewhere safer.
The Chiang Mai Provincial Administrative Organization sent officers to look into the cause after the incident. Their early view is that the trunk rotted from the inside, given the tree’s age. The latest survey counts 1,043 yang na still standing along the Chiang Mai stretch of the road, most of them more than a hundred years old. The PAO and related agencies say they regularly send arborists to check the trees’ health, assess risk and trim branches.
