outonalimbts
ArboristSite Operative
When you work in the woods long enough you see trees fall in unexpected ways.
To answer your question, it is possible for even the most experienced person to get killed doing everything correctly. We come to get cocky, at times because we are professionals and we have cut thousands of trees. Many of which were deadly instruments just standing there.
I used to give classes all the time when I was in the Army. I was a regular at all kinds of classes. Not because I knew the material any better but because of my style of teaching. I like to explain it first throughly then I do it, then I have the students do it.
As a logger I was asked to break in the newbies, get them into the woods, show me the best way to make the lead and which trees I should take and why. Eventually we would start to cut. On one particular occasion this new guy Jim wanted to watch me cut this very large diameter Fir. This tree seemed to have been left to grow from the first cut, and this was a third generation harvest. This one tree if cut properly would fill 1/3 of a truck of short logs.
I told Jim to stand about 40' away from the tree so he would have time to react if it started to fall, he was off to the side behind me. I made my face cut, and looked around to see him where I had stationed him. I proceed to begin my back cut, and guess what, the tree crumbled, it was rotten through about 15' above my head, but looked totally solid. When the tree started to move, it exploded, I mean if it had been packed with explosives it wouldn't have exploded any differently.
Jim had decided stupidly to get a better view, and was only about 15' behind me in my escape path... I not only ran into him but he was in so much shock that I had to pull him out of the way as the top came crashing down on the very point we were standing. To have seen the way this tree collapsed I still don't understand how it was standing in the first place.
When the solid portion of the tree hit the ground, it sheared and caused the top to begin to fall in a different direction, it again struck the ground and shifted its path, it finally came to rest where Jim had been standing. The original head lean was almost exactly the other way.
Jim quit his job, went back to school and is now an X-ray tech.
Some back story here, Jim had worked with us for 6 months on the landing and 4 months as a swamper. So he knew something about the way the trees can act.
A few years later, I was doing some USDA contract thinning in the Sit Grieves National forest in Alpine, AZ. I was assigned to fell trees on a parcel of land to assist in Mistletoe isolation. I had to fall a medium sized Pinion pine because it was totally infested with mistletoe. I read the log and it showed that it couldn't fall anyway but down hill, I made my face cut and it barber chaired, I moved very quickly, but it ended up landing on me, and pinning me to the ground under its branches. My crew cut me out.
The Forest Ranger on that project had been there that day and had seen this tree fall, he said that he had never seen that particular problem before. His comments reinforce my title, trees act unexpectedly.
Be careful , it is dangerous out there.
To answer your question, it is possible for even the most experienced person to get killed doing everything correctly. We come to get cocky, at times because we are professionals and we have cut thousands of trees. Many of which were deadly instruments just standing there.
I used to give classes all the time when I was in the Army. I was a regular at all kinds of classes. Not because I knew the material any better but because of my style of teaching. I like to explain it first throughly then I do it, then I have the students do it.
As a logger I was asked to break in the newbies, get them into the woods, show me the best way to make the lead and which trees I should take and why. Eventually we would start to cut. On one particular occasion this new guy Jim wanted to watch me cut this very large diameter Fir. This tree seemed to have been left to grow from the first cut, and this was a third generation harvest. This one tree if cut properly would fill 1/3 of a truck of short logs.
I told Jim to stand about 40' away from the tree so he would have time to react if it started to fall, he was off to the side behind me. I made my face cut, and looked around to see him where I had stationed him. I proceed to begin my back cut, and guess what, the tree crumbled, it was rotten through about 15' above my head, but looked totally solid. When the tree started to move, it exploded, I mean if it had been packed with explosives it wouldn't have exploded any differently.
Jim had decided stupidly to get a better view, and was only about 15' behind me in my escape path... I not only ran into him but he was in so much shock that I had to pull him out of the way as the top came crashing down on the very point we were standing. To have seen the way this tree collapsed I still don't understand how it was standing in the first place.
When the solid portion of the tree hit the ground, it sheared and caused the top to begin to fall in a different direction, it again struck the ground and shifted its path, it finally came to rest where Jim had been standing. The original head lean was almost exactly the other way.
Jim quit his job, went back to school and is now an X-ray tech.
Some back story here, Jim had worked with us for 6 months on the landing and 4 months as a swamper. So he knew something about the way the trees can act.
A few years later, I was doing some USDA contract thinning in the Sit Grieves National forest in Alpine, AZ. I was assigned to fell trees on a parcel of land to assist in Mistletoe isolation. I had to fall a medium sized Pinion pine because it was totally infested with mistletoe. I read the log and it showed that it couldn't fall anyway but down hill, I made my face cut and it barber chaired, I moved very quickly, but it ended up landing on me, and pinning me to the ground under its branches. My crew cut me out.
The Forest Ranger on that project had been there that day and had seen this tree fall, he said that he had never seen that particular problem before. His comments reinforce my title, trees act unexpectedly.
Be careful , it is dangerous out there.
