CHARLOTTE, N.C. — One person is still in the hospital Friday night after a tree fell onto a car in Elizabeth Thursday.
Friday the remnants of an aging red maple tree are broken and scattered on the sides of east 7th street in Elizabeth.
Just after 5 p.m. Thursday, Diane Copeland was driving in rush hour traffic.
"I couldn't go back, I couldn't go forward. I couldn't move," Copeland said.
She had just picked up her passenger five minutes earlier and they were headed to the library.
“I could see in my peripheral vision that something brown was coming toward my car and I didn't know what it was until it hit my car.
Don McSween, Charlotte's arborist, said the tree had internal rotting, but there were no obvious exterior signs of the damage inside.
[ IMAGES: Tree falls on car near uptown Charlotte ]
McSween showed us a piece of the wood from the tree.
“This fungus is digesting everything but the lignin in the wood,” McSween said.
An outside contractor took inventory of the tree in 2012 and found the tree was in "fair" condition.
“If they're poor or very poor we will go out and reexamine and remove them if they're in that condition. Fair is more to do with age than anything,” McSween said.
The city maintains about 180,000 trees.
Many of them went up with the neighborhoods surrounding uptown, built in the 1920s.
Still, McSween said even with trees nearly 100 years in age, what happened here is rare, but it does happen.
Just two-and-a-half weeks ago, a tree came down knocking in the roof of this Dilworth home and hitting another tree.
Channel 9 went by that home today and found it is still considered unsafe.
About 158,000 of the city’s 180,000 street trees have had their condition inspected. City staff inspects more than 10,000 trees a year. Staff is now reviewing the inspection strategy to decide if changes should be made.
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