Three officials from the Ministry of Construction have been dismissed or demoted while many others were reprimanded for irresponsibility in the recent Hanoi tree purge.
Trees on Nguyen Chi Thanh Street
Hanoi authorities asked the local Construction Department to dismiss the head of the Plant Engineering Supervision Office. They also asked the head and deputy head of the Infrastructure, Environment and Underground Work Office be demoted.
The director and vice director of Construction Department were reprimanded as the leaders of the department for the lack of responsibility in planning.
Many other individuals were also reprimanded, among them are leaders of Hanoi Finance Department and heads of the Department of Information and Communications.
In March, plans to cut down about 6,700 trees in Hanoi stirred public outcry. The authorities launched an inspection to review and identify areas of concern in implementation of the plan.
Inspectors determined that heads of the project failed to properly inform and gather opinion from the public, failing to communicate clearly that some were old and decaying and needed to be replaced for safety reasons, leading to widespread misunderstanding that Hanoi was chopping down its trees.
What the public saw was whole streets denuded of old sprawling trees that had provided shade for residents for decades and were integral to the aesthetics of the capital.
Several details in the plan and the field survey were found to be vague and careless.
