Attack on Oak Grove

At 9:00 the university submitted a letter to Judge Miller who placed an injunction against cutting the Oak grove. Before she responded the University had arborist extractors cutting limbs off of trees. They started between 9:15 and 9:30. They cut many limbs from the redwood tree with four tee sitters in it. They were stopped from cutting more by tree sitter actions. People began to gather on the ground and decry the Universities actions and to video tape. Soon mainstream news crews were there as well. Then many limbs were cut off of two or more oak trees in the middle of the grove. Some branches were ten inches in diameter. The extractors then got their huge crane going with four people in the basket. The wet for the redwood tree and at the same time two cherry pickers with crews also attacked. Many of the extractors had pole cutters or poles with hooks. They cut down two five gallon jugs of water, several bags of food, other gear and almost succeeded in cutting down one of the platforms. They were again stopped by the heroic actions of the tree sitters.
After six hours UC Police Chief Harrison went up and spoke to the tree sitters. She said that they were done for the day.

This was a clear violation of the intent of the injunction that says that they can not cut the trees. This means, in my mind, not cut parts of the trees. They were formerly denied permission to cut branches that overhung the sidewalk. Today they said that they were just doing "strategic pruning."

I think that they wanted to make life hard on the tree sitters. More importantly they think that the injunction will hold past the first football game. This gives them a problem of how to have the grove cut off and surrounded and also get tens of thousands of fans into the game. Today they put up a fence on the southern end of the grove and will remove a piece of the fence on the west side and fans can stream through the I House parking lot. They feared people could then climb into the trees as tree sitter Jeff did some time ago. That is why they cut branches in several places to stop us from being able to climb from tree to tree to the Redwood.

for more info: saveoaks.com