PROJECT OVERVIEW

We’ve faced many challenges in tree work, but the only thing that scares us is bad trees — inherently unsafe, unclimbable, unriggable, ready to fail! Recently we were faced with a co-dominant hackberry (70′ height, 120′ crown, 6+’ diameter). The homeowner heard a loud crack a week previously, thought it was a transformer blowing. While cleaning up overgrowth and vines from his yard, he noticed this huge split where the co-dominant leaders’ included bark was coming apart at the seams. The neighbor beside him was very scared (rightfully) with every rain and wind in the meanwhile, since it was likely to fail over his garage apartment and house. The canopy stretched over 2 house roofs, a garage with 2nd story apartment, a shed, fence & new sod, household power lines and main power lines & communications cables. The tree was not safe to climb, as you could actually watch the halves of the split moving when there was a breeze.

We bought 2 fresh heavy duty ratchet straps to secure the tree so we could begin work. We brought in a tow behind spider lift with 55′ reach and began to piece out the tree (couldn’t rig off the spider lift, no material handler capability). Then we brought on our log truck  so we could crane out major leaders and branches with slings. Things were going well until mid-afternoon when we had 3/4 of the brush down, when a huge storm rolled through. High gusting winds (70MPH) and severe thunderstorm watch, possibly tornadoes were predicted. Thankfully, the storm went north of us, but we did see about 15 minutes of strong gusts as we were piecing out the last of the brush.

At the end, both neighbors who shared the expense of the hazard tree removal and were very happy and relieved to have it down, just in time before the storm hit!