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A more than 100-year-old historic elm that has graced the Basil Garden at the Alumni House was severely damaged by a storm and will be taken down.
Storm winds ripped one of three towering forks off the elm's trunk on Aug. 26. The splintered trunk crashed into the Alumni Association parking lot and damaged one of only two cars there at 4 p.m. on a Sunday.
"The tree has been so damaged that it will have to come down," said George Roberts, construction foreman for Georgia Tech. "We met with an arborist and he said it has been damaged so badly it will die.
"I hate that we have to take it down," Roberts said. "A lot of people will hate that we have to do that. But it has become dangerous."
Roberts said the tree will be removed before the first home football game, when Tech plays Samford University on Sept. 8. The Alumni Association has a scheduled event in the Basil Garden that day.
"The main thing is that we don't want anybody to get hurt," Roberts said.
Arborists had estimated earlier that the tree was between 130 and 150 years old and near the end of its life cycle.
One of the oldest trees on campus, it survived Dutch elm disease, which was first found in the United States in Ohio in 1930 and spread throughout North America. The disease destroyed more than half the elm trees in the northern United States.
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