Story here. Apparently, she was bike riding with her husband when a freak storm caused a tree to fall on her. She was 46.
I have several mutual friends w/ her and her husband and saw the posts coming in about the accident from the husband’s feed on Facebook on Fri/Sat, including the one where he told everybody she’d passed. Just awful awful.
Its been a long time, but as I remember it, the bike trails in the forest preserves (one news article said it happened in a “forest park” which I assume is the forest preserve) were wide enough for cars to drive down. they weren’t actually “in the woods” like here in Colorado. I’m trying to understand how a tree could fall and hit someone without that person having enough warning to get out of the way.
The Chicago theater community has been hit by several deaths in the past week.
It happens, apparently. Greg Abbott, the Texas Attorney General and Republican candidate for Governor had a tree fall on him years ago while he was out jogging, and it paralyzed him.
a weakened limb can come down in a second. with storm and wind around you then you may not hear it. the limb or tree is out of your sight and you may not see it.
I’m specifically talking Chicago forest preserves. Like I said, here in Colorado, I can understand it because the paths run THROUGH the woods. As I recall way back when in Chicago forest preserves, the bike paths are essentially roads wide enough to drive a car through.
Why would the width of the path matter? Thiswoman was sitting on a bench next to either a wide path or a road- and it’s not the only such incident I’ve heard of in NYC
“forest park” is really odd phrasing, but yes, she was killed when the was caught in a storm on a bike path in a forest preserve.
While some of our forest preserves do have fairly wide paved paths - wide enough to allow two bikes to pass in opposite directions without difficulty - they’re more appropriate to the occasional golf cart than to car traffic.
It took paramedics 20 minutes to reach her on foot because they couldn’t get an ambulance in, so it couldn’t have been all that wide a path. Certainly not too wide for tree limbs to be close to or over the path and a tree uprooted by the severe winds we had come through with the storm on Friday.
If anything, wide paths have greater potential than narrow ones to create deadly conditions when a tree falls - there often aren’t other trees between it and the path to catch it as it falls and hold it propped there until the arborists do their next inspection.