This week, I was serenaded at work by the sound of chainsaws outside my window. No, I didn't have Bruce Campbell making a guest appearance as Ash from Army of Darkness – we had a crew come to cut down some dead trees in the lot between our building and the road. Most of which, for some reason, seemed to be located directly outside my window:
For those of you unfamiliar with how to cut trees (yes, there's more than just taking an axe/chainsaw to the bugger!), one tried-and-true method involves securing the top of the tree with rope/cable so you don't have the sucker crashing down on you or others around you. If you have other trees nearby, you can use one of them as a pulley to keep the tree vertical once you cut the base – otherwise, you secure the line to a nearby heavy object so your tree doesn't fall in a direction you didn't want it to go.
In the picture above, they've already looped and secured the line around the tree on the left, and are now pulling it up and around the tree on the right. I thought they might have a problem since the loop on the tree they're cutting was taut, but had hooked around a branch so they couldn't tighten it as much as they probably normally would. The guy on the left is going to hold the line while the third guy cuts the tree at the base – the intent is to keep the tree vertical after the cut so they can just lop off sections of it until it's so much firewood.
Unfortunately, the loop wasn't secure enough…as soon as the guy with the chainsaw had cut through the tree, it started to topple over. The one tree branch the loop was straining against snapped and while the loop contracted, the tree fell sideways. The guy on the right in the above picture went running pell-mell out of the way to avoid getting brained.
As you can see here, the loop finally caught the tree before it went totally horizontal, and the guy on the right is walking back to help out. I think they might have been making fun of him for running away, but heck, if a few hundred pounds of dead wood was about to come crashing down on me, I'd be running too.
The crew finished cutting the rest of the dead trees without any more close calls, but it was really hard for me not to keep watching, just in case they had another "incident". I have a feeling this kind of work is more dangerous than it looks, if you're not careful. I'd be interested in seeing what their training and safety guidelines look like.
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RossRuns 