Daver
PMA Member
I am posting this as a general safety advisory to anyone working in the timber with their chainsaw like I have been in the past several weeks. I can say that I have upgraded my personal safety approach regarding chainsaw use and yet there are still times when the potential danger of timber work rears up.
Some background...I had a bona fide TSI effort in my timber about 4 or 5 years ago and as a result of that project there are a fair number of trees present that were girdled(killed) then and are still standing now. Some species rot out much faster than others and have fallen over on their own, some species are still standing pretty strong, hickories in particular. So I have a real mix of live and dead trees in certain areas of the timber and some of those dead ones are pretty BIG trees.
I have been going back through some of these areas recently dropping some still live trees along with some dead ones. I mostly avoid cutting dead trees though because of the strong potential for overhead branches to fall off suddenly and clobber me below. To me, cutting a dead tree is far more dangerous than cutting a live one.
But here is the twist I had this past weekend that I wanted to warn others about...I had just cut a medium sized, live hickory and watched it fall safely away. It did work its' way through a couple of other tree tops on the way down, but nothing out of the ordinary at all. About 1 minute after that tree fell though, a huge dead branch, big enough to mess anyone up, fell suddenly to the ground near where I had just dropped the living tree.
It so happened that I was far enough away, about 30 feet or so, that I wasn't in immediate danger of being hit...BUT had I watched that first tree fall and then proceeded downslope for whatever reason, I easily could have been right under that spot in the approximate minute it took that branch to "decide" to fall and that would have been bad.
The lesson...LOOK UP, even AFTER dropping a tree and especially when there is dead wood in the timber. What I am pretty sure happened is that the first tree fell into/through the branches of one of the large dead trees and loosened things up enough that it fell, only it was delayed fall that could have been quite dangerous. Watch out for any dead trees in particular, especially the big ones!
Some background...I had a bona fide TSI effort in my timber about 4 or 5 years ago and as a result of that project there are a fair number of trees present that were girdled(killed) then and are still standing now. Some species rot out much faster than others and have fallen over on their own, some species are still standing pretty strong, hickories in particular. So I have a real mix of live and dead trees in certain areas of the timber and some of those dead ones are pretty BIG trees.
I have been going back through some of these areas recently dropping some still live trees along with some dead ones. I mostly avoid cutting dead trees though because of the strong potential for overhead branches to fall off suddenly and clobber me below. To me, cutting a dead tree is far more dangerous than cutting a live one.
But here is the twist I had this past weekend that I wanted to warn others about...I had just cut a medium sized, live hickory and watched it fall safely away. It did work its' way through a couple of other tree tops on the way down, but nothing out of the ordinary at all. About 1 minute after that tree fell though, a huge dead branch, big enough to mess anyone up, fell suddenly to the ground near where I had just dropped the living tree.
It so happened that I was far enough away, about 30 feet or so, that I wasn't in immediate danger of being hit...BUT had I watched that first tree fall and then proceeded downslope for whatever reason, I easily could have been right under that spot in the approximate minute it took that branch to "decide" to fall and that would have been bad.
The lesson...LOOK UP, even AFTER dropping a tree and especially when there is dead wood in the timber. What I am pretty sure happened is that the first tree fell into/through the branches of one of the large dead trees and loosened things up enough that it fell, only it was delayed fall that could have been quite dangerous. Watch out for any dead trees in particular, especially the big ones!
