News
Stack ’em up
When city workers in Spokane, Wash., arrived at a local park recently, here’s what they found: 45 plastic picnic tables stacked in the form of a pyramid rising several feet into the air. It’s not the first time someone has pulled this prank, according to Northwest Cable News (NWCN.com), and city workers say they aren’t at all amused.
Dismantling the picnic table pyramid was a delicate operation. First, an urban forestry crew with a bucket truck took down the top layers. Then, a Spokane parks foreman used a forklift to remove the remaining tables.
“We are talking 32 to 35 feet up in the air,” said parks foreman David Randolph, “and there is pavement on the ground. If somebody was to take a fall or have a table fall on them trying to set those up, it could be a very serious injury. It could cause death.”
Officials suspect local teens are the culprits. A maintenance worker previously caught some teens trying to stack tables in the same park. There was a similar stacking incident at another park several weeks earlier.
Now city workers say they will spread the tables around to make it harder to collect and assemble them. What they really wish, though, is that would-be pranksters would use the picnic tables for, well, picnics.
