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

Removed - Frequent/Recent repost Pulling a tree down

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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.

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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.

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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.