Salt Lake City worker accidentally poisons hundreds of trees in Fairpark area

Hundreds of trees along North Temple near the Utah State Fairpark are now dead or dying, after they were accidentally sprayed with a weed killer. The City's Parks Department is owning up to the mistake.

[charlestolley]

It turns out that when you make a habit of poisoning things, sometimes you poison more things than you intend

[Don.Challenger]

The video title would be more accurate as: "Salt Lake City, Fairpark Area supervisors fail to monitor their staff poisoning hundreds of trees and the surrounding soil for years."

[herbienbrian]

Imagine what it's doing to the people

[tuomasholo]

In ten years people are asking why there’s cancer clusters there.

[loris]

Instead of poison they could have used a weed eater. Herbicides have consequences every time they are used and this was so unnecessary.

[danlowe]

This is the first government employee to admit wrongdoing in many, many years.

[TheKnifed]

Any chance that the chemical could have seeped into groundwater? If it's unsafe to replant a tree, I wonder how much chemical was applied and how far it reached

[taradufour]

So who's paying the tax payers back?

[SJ-iqpp]

Omg. I’m interested to know how the poison affected wildlife (birds, squirrels, even dogs), in addition to people (elderly, babies, kids)…as I assume 2nd hand poisoning since it infected the trees and the dirt.

[lucystrider]

How is this chemical safe for people, animals and groundwater if it kills trees and they might have to wait years for the soil to recover???

[Earthgnomie]

How about just hire landscapers that don’t use herbicides and pesticides instead of poisoning the plants and us by proxy.

[garyharrington]

Good thing that employe wasn't in charge of a nuclear reactor😂

[KarlWhales]

This is a multi-million dollar mistake. Big oof

[amyjordan]

We have been trying to figure out why the trees were dying, this is so sad!

[stones]

All that poison goes into your tap water.

[lindastevens]

It’s tragic 😢
No replacing them the land is poisoned 😮😢

[justlucky]

Somebody needed a little supervision before it got that far!!!

[ricpruneda]

Far from "a simple mistake", this is inexcusable.

[kimberlycarrigan]

This is a systemic problem. Alarm bells should have gone off when he prepared to do it.

[xlerb]

May or may not be the employees fault. I've seen lots of times where pesticides are stored in unlabelled or mislabeled containers, mixing instructions are incorrect, or someone is just flat out told to use the wrong chemical or given wrong instructions on how/where to apply it. It happened to us years ago. We noticed an airplane sprayer going over one of our fields but we hadn't hired any spraying done. Long story short they got the location wrong and sprayed our field with a herbicide that would have been fine on the wheat field where it should have been applied but killed our flax field. They owned up to their mistake but it was still a battle with their insurance company as they tried one trick after another to lowball us on the settlement.