Thanks for the support TreeMachine, tree bob, logcutter and Okietreedude...Okie and I are squared away...thanks for the PM and kind words Okie.
Today's work was house-top, ladder, some trunk straddling...no spikes today...not because I am overly concerned about spiking but because we found ways not to climb the tree we used for our winch belay.
Today we tackled a fair sized sweetgum that blew down, root ball turned loose and the tree was leaning on the rooftop. I was able to use my recently purchased throw bag (courtesy of New Tribe) to set a line thru a high crotch of a nearby pine…about 35 feet from the house and 6 feet to the rear and left of the rootball. The crotch was about 40 feet up.
We used the ¾” line to pull the Warn Winch block up to the crotch. We rigged a VERY large block at the “base” of the tree (just above a chainlink fence…too much debris to get lower). [This block has been borrowed from an oil rigging supply house. My brother-in-law, one of our team members, spent 6 hours a few days ago tracking it down when we were removing a large pine from a house. We needed to pull our wire rope thru that high crotch belay and rather than go angling down to the winch, we needed to redirect horizontally to the winch. Bill and the home owner, went to every H. Depot, hardware store, etc. in Picayune, MS, trying to find a suitable block. They finally tried a boatyard and the nearby oil-rig supply house. The first block offered to them was about 2 foot diameter, on a pallet of its own…Bill politely declined. The old timer then scrounged around and found a 10 inch diameter, 80 pound block he has loaned us while we are down here.]
Once we got the high belay set, we used the winch to lift the big bottom block into position. This home had been totally flooded. The owner, Tingy, a 71 year old, uninsured, pretty frail fellow (maybe 110 pounds) had started Katrina in a boat in his garage with his little dog. When the water got too high in the garage, they floated outside into the wind and got on the roof. When that wasn’t enough, they got back in the boat and found a higher roof. This is a very tough, scrappy Louisiana swamper…he quit school at 16 to trap muskrats and has had a very interesting life.
We rigged a choker on the trunk about 8 feet away from the house…that left about 15-20 feet of tree on and over the house.
I got on a ladder and blocked off the limbs…we made a pile of brush and limbs on the roof and I let the limbs and small trunk parts slowly hinge down onto the brush to protect the roof.
Once we cleared all we could of the easy stuff, we tightened the winch and found that we could lift the tree off the house. We then suspended it a few inches over the roof and cut the trunk where it had been resting on the roof. Another cut about 2 feet out from the roof left the trunk suspended at about a 45 degree angle beside the house and pointed at the house.
We put our ladder up against the trunk (no good nearby trees to rig off of for me and the trunk was behaving nicely) and chunked a few 3 foot pieces off until we were sure that dropping the spar would not hit the house.
Bill chapped and helmeted up and cut the spar into the marsh mud that now covers everything in the yard (and the house…inside the house it is pretty vile).
Everything went pretty well today with one exception. I was using my new Tenex sling and block from Sherrill…it has been doing great work. Billy told me on my last block cut that the saw was close to the sling…I knew that but did not realize that when the piece started hinging it was going to move the sling closer to the saw…yep, I nicked the the sling…just a few strands but still made me cuss myself. I was just winding off the throttle to finish the cut with a Silky and it nipped it. I will probably contact Nick to see if he can eye splice the other end for me and I’ll just switch the block to it.
Here are some pictures from today…first is a house that floated off its fundation and came to a rest 100 feet away, astride the road. It turned 180 degrees as it floated….roof support crew and me; cutting chunks, Tingy entertaining us and our entire volunteer crew with Tingy once the job was finished.