Police have charged a man with deliberately setting Timaru’s public Christmas tree alight.<\/p>\n
A photo posted to social media by the district council shows the scorched side of the 10-metre-tall tree in the Canterbury city’s centre surrounded by a melted white picket fence in Caroline Bay Piazza.<\/p>\n
Police were called to the Caroline Bay Piazza at about 5.30am on Friday.<\/p>\n
Officers arrested a 30-year-old man who is due to appear in court on Friday on charges including arson and possessing a knife in a public place.<\/p>\n
The council said the tree has suffered significant fire damage and they would have to remove the tree this year.<\/p>\n
It said the tree won’t be replaced this year.<\/p>\n
“We’ll be getting in touch with our insurers and looking into options going ahead,” the council said.<\/p>\n
The Christmas tree’s height includes the star, weighs around 7000kg with the base, and features a 275-metre string lights.<\/p>\n
Source: RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Police have charged a man with deliberately setting Timaru’s public Christmas tree alight. A photo posted to social media by the district council shows the scorched side of the 10-metre-tall tree in the Canterbury city’s centre surrounded by a melted white picket fence in Caroline Bay Piazza. Police were called to the Caroline Bay Piazza […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":16019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16018"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16020,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16018\/revisions\/16020"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}