Residents on Beckwith Street in Manoa say they are happy the city has decided to remove the remaining pine trees lining their street, four years after a 100-foot-tall pine crashed into a house and critically injured a 12-year-old girl.

"If they'd taken the trees out 30 years ago, we wouldn't have had all these problems," said resident Colin Fong. He said a pine fell in his family's yard too, and that a petition organized by his father 30 years ago to get rid of the trees went unheeded then.

During the past two weeks, the city informed residents that workers will remove all nine Norfolk Island pine trees beginning Monday and replace them with fern podocarpus, also known as a fern pine.

The city Division of Urban Forestry had removed seven pine trees soon after March 2005, when Julia Engle was injured by a diseased and termite-damaged tree that crashed into her bedroom as she slept.

Engle was in a coma for about two weeks and underwent therapy at a clinic in California. The family's lawyer, Rick Fried, said Engle will be a senior at Honolulu Waldorf School and plans to attend college. The family has moved to Hawai'i Kai, he said.

After the accident, private arborists hired by the city found that seven of the trees were seriously decayed and damaged by termites.

"Just a few inches of bark was holding the whole tree. All the rest was mud," said Beckwith Street resident Jacques Moulin, 74. He said that before Engle was injured, his car was damaged when a branch fell through the windshield.

Now, the city has decided to remove the remaining nine pine trees because topping and regrowth since 2005 has made them top-heavy and unstable, Urban Forestry Administrator Stan Oka said.

"We didn't just clean up and walk away," Oka said. "We've been watching (the remaining trees)."

Moulin said that after the trees were topped, extra branches sprouted, creating surface area for wind to catch.

"If there was a strong wind or something, those big branches could fall on a house again," he said.

The city hired Trees of Hawai'i to remove the trees next week, the same company that removed the seven trees after Engle was hurt. Workers will begin by removing the foliage and then use a crane to remove the trunks.

The pine trees will be replaced with fern podocarpus. They grow from 30 to 50 feet high and are evergreens commonly planted in residential areas.

"What they're doing sounds so beautiful," said Moulin's wife, Jane. "These trees aren't even pretty anymore since they've cut them down. It used to be a whole alley of trees. We're happy to see them go."