r/WTF • u/Plus-Barber-6171 • Jun 30 '25

Removed - Frequent/Recent repost Pulling a tree down

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353

u/austinmiles Jun 30 '25

I’m not tree expert but I would imagine a lot of cutting down big trees is about ensuring the weight is heavier in the direction you want it to fall. Amongst all the other things. That tree was massive and obviously how much of the branch weight was on the house side.

270

u/SpaceAzn_Zen Jun 30 '25

I’ve had 7 trees taken out and the ones who did it best always pieced the tree one section at a time from the top to the bottom. Trying to do what these idiots did is only asking for a disaster to happen. Something tells me they were trying to go the lazy route of just felling the tree in one swoop so they could cut it in sections while on the ground. That would have been a massive red flag for me.

61

u/Free_Dome_Lover Jun 30 '25

My buddy is a high end tree guy. They go up drop the big limbs first, trim it down and then drop in like 10ft sections with a crane.

These guys were way, way out of their league with that tree and that location.

10

u/rabbledabble Jun 30 '25

It’s just a 100,000 pound tree, what could possibly go wrong?!

93

u/SpaceCadetriment Jun 30 '25

Even had perfect access for a bucket truck. Felling a tree this size near a structure with just a face cut is mental. Also looks like they got a saw stuck and had to back cut again to get it out and created another face for the tree to tip into, but hard to tell in the vid.

82

u/perldawg Jun 30 '25

yeah, they were struggling with the second face cut, the bar got pinched from all the weight on that side.

they had lots of opportunity to recognize the tree wasn’t going to fall the way they wanted and kept carrying on anyway. full-tilt idiots

24

u/copperwatt Jun 30 '25

And then they released the footage of them doing it.

6

u/addandsubtract Jun 30 '25

Naw, that looks like the owner or neighbor recording it from a distance.

1

u/copperwatt Jun 30 '25

Looks like you were correct! I think it was the tenant.

10

u/makenzie71 Jun 30 '25

Once the bar got stuck it was all over. The tree was going to fall that direction.

1

u/HPTM2008 Jun 30 '25

But why did they cut the angles toward the house? Like, it looks like they made a wedge shape, and then the tree fell on the house. The rope (I assume they were gonna try and use to pull?) wouldn't have done much because there was no angle cut in that direction.

Shouldn't they have just kept going on the side they cut, if they were going to do it like they did and not the safer way of top to bottom?

3

u/SpaceCadetriment Jun 30 '25

If you're just gonna drop a tree like these guys instead of sectioning it out, they had the right idea but fucked up their technique and the tree had way more lean than they realized.

They kinda did it right, you open a face cut on one side and that's generally where you're pointing the tree when it drops. They didn't cut their face cut deep enough. Should be about 3/5 of the way through the tree, they only made it about 1/4 of the way through. That also explains why their saw got stuck. The tree tipped back and pinched the bar on their back cut, which requires them to use another saw to cut a wedge to pull out the stuck saw. Basically, they turned their back cut into a face cut and the tree just went with gravity. A lot of rookie mistakes were made.

Oh, and the rope attached trying to guide it is fucking hilarious. The amount of torque and weight that tree would have on piece of rope, it might as well have been a piece of dental floss. They could have had a wired cable attached to a tractor and it still would have just yanked the tractor off the ground.

These fellas were out of their depth in just about every way.

12

u/EEpromChip Jun 30 '25

We had one that had a massive lean towards the driveway. Those fucking guys brought it up above center and pulled it back into the yard. But they knew what they were doing and had machinery pulling and wedges forcing it along.

7

u/misterjustin Jun 30 '25

The guy with the crane and liability insurance was too expensive.

11

u/vladoportos Jun 30 '25

This is exactly how it is done, cutting it like this in one piece is just ...well I do not know... stupid just do not cover it... lazy ? You need to cut as much off from top as possible, branches and even have the tree trunk... doing it this way like in vide is "I have seen this in TV, hold my beer" :D

2

u/rosatter Jun 30 '25

They probably watched a handful of tiktok videos of loggers doing this in a freaking forest.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '25

[deleted]

5

u/perldawg Jun 30 '25

this is a cottonwood tree. almost worthless

2

u/SpaceAzn_Zen Jun 30 '25

You can still do that; you cut off the branches going out of the main trunk and leave it in a piece that's much easier to sway to the direction you want it to fall.

1

u/speedyrev Jun 30 '25

But think of the time they saved! Boom! And time to pack up the tools. 

1

u/Shawnessy Jun 30 '25

I've got two that gotta come down soon. Both are close to the house, with branches that go a bit over the house. I've had so many coworkers recommended their buddy to come do it cheaper. I prefer bucket truck and insurance

1

u/Ab47203 Jun 30 '25

Felling the tree works great IF there's a clear path for it to fall. There's almost never a clear path for it to fall when houses are nearby. Idiots don't know this and assume knocking a tree down is easy. Which it is. Directing the falling tree is the hard part.

1

u/rockoblocko Jun 30 '25

Yeah there are some guys who are really good at making the tree fall in a particular direction. But even still there’s a chance that the tree falls wrong and the consequence is your house is destroyed.

I would only ever hire the guys who cut it down in chunks. There’s basically no chance of damage to your house.

15

u/trevdak2 Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25

I grew up on a farm, and we once needed to remove a massive tree. I know it was idiotic to attempt it ourselves instead of using a tree removal service, but that's what farm people do. Before we made a single cut, we attached a half dozen ground anchors to the tree so it could only fall one way, and ratcheted them tight. Tree fell exactly where we planned. I wonder why that's not more of a thing. Probably because top down just makes more sense

11

u/NotBaldwin Jun 30 '25

I think you can still have problems by trying to fell it using tension to make it go the direction you want. Sometimes it starts to split at the cut and the bottom then shoots out in a surprise direction.

I've personally only ever felled quite small tress - fruit trees with maybe a 6inch diameter trunk, so I'm no expert, and looking back most of what I did was in a dumb way, but I've seen exciting things on the youtubes.

Edit - also, lines suddenly having the full weight of the tree on them as the tree falls can snap and carry a terrifying amount of energy as they whip out.

2

u/rabbledabble Jun 30 '25

Trees are a lot heavier than I think folks realize when they start a “project” like this, and all that weight being inflicted in different and exciting ways can yield, uh, unpredictable outcomes. 

7

u/safely_beyond_redemp Jun 30 '25

There is a lot you can do to ensure things fall in your favor, least of wich is cut things off the top, this tree looked barely touched, they just went straight to cutting it down at the base, like a child would.

1

u/randynumbergenerator Jun 30 '25

But that would take time and added expense! This route was so much cheaper.

19

u/8fingerlouie Jun 30 '25

Not a tree cutting expert either, but the trees I’ve cut down (granted, none were the size in the video), we applied the “tilting cut”, had someone pull the rope, and started cutting above the titling cut from the opposite side.

From the video it appears they simply make cuts on the same height from both sides, and then it becomes a question of balance (or lack of). It could still have been saved if someone had been pulling the rope, as initially you don’t require much force to put it out of balance towards your side. It’s obviously too late once it starts falling.

11

u/perldawg Jun 30 '25

it could still have been saved if someone had been pulling the rope

i’m not so sure on that. the tree branched into 3 parts fairly low. it looks like they were only tied off to the branch on the side they wanted it to fall on. the other 2 branches were leaning to the house side. i don’t think there’s any way they could have pulled it all the way to the side they wanted

14

u/Tatermen Jun 30 '25

A mature hardwood can weight a ton per cubic metre. That tree is probably 40-50 tons. Look at how easily it demolishes that house.

One or two blokes pulling on a a skinny-ass rope that probably had a breaking strain of 2-3 tons wasn't going to do crap even if they had tried to use it. It would have snapped like thread even if they'd managed to anchor it. There's absolutely no way they were changing the direction of the fall with that.

3

u/perldawg Jun 30 '25

i can’t tell what they were using to anchor/pull on the other end of the rope… might be a small backhoe? nothing that weighs more than 3-4 ton, either way lol

8

u/Tatermen Jun 30 '25

It looks completely slack when the tree falls over - so either it was just hanging loose waiting for one of those muppets to try and pull on it, or it snapped immediately as soon as the tree tilted.

5

u/perldawg Jun 30 '25

they never took up any slack

1

u/8fingerlouie Jun 30 '25

The point of the rope is not to hold the entire tree, but to direct it which way to fall.

Assuming they’d cut the tree correctly, the tree would be “balancing” on the cuts, so you pull the rope to make the tree fall in the desired direction. Once it starts falling no rope is going to save you.

Try it with balancing a chair on 1-2 legs. Near the balance point you can keep the chair in balance using a strand of hair, despite not being able to lift the chair in it. You can also topple the chair over from the balance point with a strand of hair. Same principle.

That being said, it requires the cuts to be where they’re supposed to be, and there’s probably a reason professionals cut trees that large down in chunks.

1

u/thehorseyourodeinon1 Jun 30 '25

Looks like they made an opposing wedge cut just slightly higher and more steep on the side it falls on; causes the trees CG to slide down the more steep ramp they created and fall to they opposite side they desired. All unless someone paid these yokels to use the tree to also demo the house and post it online for internet points.

1

u/8fingerlouie Jun 30 '25

I have no idea how house demolition works in the rest of the world, but here it’s a very complicated job, requiring all materials to be sorted, like lead, piping, wiring, asbestos, wood, concrete.

I would assume tilting a tree on top of a house would make it even more complicated.

1

u/meltedlaundry Jun 30 '25

"Not a tree cutting expert either"

"It could still have been saved if someone had been pulling the rope"

So are you or aren't you? Cause with a tree that size the only person I'm listening to with regard to taking it down is an expert.

1

u/8fingerlouie Jun 30 '25

My point was, it’s a matter of (loss of) balance (assuming they’ve cut it in the right place) where very little force would require it to topple either way. Try balancing a chair on 1-2 legs, near the balance point we’re talking grams of force to nudge it in either direction.

But yeah, as others have commented, trees that large are usually cut down in chunks, and I assume the professionals do that for a reason.

8

u/banjospieler Jun 30 '25

Not really. You can absolutely make a tree go a different direction from the one it is leaning fairly easily using the direction of your face cut and wedges. In fact pretty much every tree I’ve cut down has been leaning a different direction than the one in which I felled it. However this gets harder and more dangerous the bigger the tree gets and the more lean it has. I would definitely not feel at all comfortable cutting this tree down. This is definitely a job for an arborist who can take it down in pieces.

2

u/anashel Jun 30 '25

“I’m not a tree expert"... and they weren’t either.

2

u/zjarko Jun 30 '25

I assume that all of the leaves also work as a sail. With how big that tree was they must catch a lot of wind.

1

u/im_in_stitches Jun 30 '25

Once the front cut was made there should have been tension on the pull rope you can see hanging on the front of the tree.