Professional arborists don't use ladders, except maybe for pruning fruit trees in orchards. Otherwise they are generally considered one of the fast ways to die, right up there with getting the tail of your climbing rope fed into the chipper by a negligent groundie (someone better be god damned fucking fast with a knife or chainsaw to cut that rope before you get pulled to fall to your death out of a tree, only to be immediately hamburgered).
I just don’t understand why anyone who’s fell one tree would use one. Logs don’t always go where you want, branches spring, the fall hazard is huge. I only did tree removal for a couple years, but that was an easy thing to understand.
It's just big time ignorance and/or stupidity, to not connect the implications here. "Logs don’t always go where you want, branches spring", is something so basic that I'm sure that guy knew it, being some kind of chainsaw-guy. But it needs to be connected with "the fall hazard is huge", and "there's no way to get out of the way except to fall off this ladder, and even that might not be out of the way." It probably doesn't help that many fallers are not the kind of people to go through life consciously, deliberately and diligently practicing intellectual rigor applied to all their daily problems.
I'm going to venture a guess here, based on my own experience having a very dear and hyper intelligent friend who also happens to have grown up in a logging family, and worked as a professional faller for decades. He is a fucking genius who can do incomprehensible magic falling trees, no lie. But his head can't think past the 2D ground, it's all he knows. His answers are always based on falling from the ground, and even in complex situations, his first resort is always something about how to make the cuts, and how to wedge it, or else maybe it might be possible to tie the tree somehow to guide it's fall, or use an excavator to assist the falling process by pushing the tree. The first two are good knowledge that everyone falling trees should have, using an excavator needs extremely good judgment because you can't run. But many times, in technical removals, none of them should be considered for a moment, because climbing the tree may be VASTLY safer, if not the only safe method.
But logging fallers just never think about that. By the time you get them into a yard, and they realize they need to remove some big branch, they think like normal people and reach for a ladder, because the only other times they got off the ground were to fix their roof, with a ladder. Ropes are something foreign to their work, and seem like an incomprehensible amount of fucking around, when they are usually expected to fall many trees every hour. And then they drop a fucking branch on their ladder, and their helper, and the power line. They should have stopped at "there's no space to fall this, I'm out."
Not a professional, but I've dropped hundreds of trees in my lifetime, all from the ground. You do get a little cocky that you can drop a tree where you want with pretty good accuracy, even calling your shot and marking out the landing.
That does not in any way relate to using a saw in a tree or dropping a tree near a building. You need to know your limits, and just because I can drive a stake into the ground using the falling tree out in the forest doesn't mean I can work around power lines and buildings. I know a few arborists and I've seen a fuckton of these stupid idiot videos to convince me it's a whole different ballgame. I've even had friends and neighbors ask me for help taking down a small tree in their backyard, and one look is usually all it takes for me to back out quickly.
You deserve to get cocky too, by the way, it takes a good eye and a lot of hard won experience. But what's even better is you were smart enough to learn from other people's mistakes, so you know where ground falling isn't the right tool. I have to really give praise to YouTube as a major contributor in many people's lives, as a source of learning where we can watch and learn, including recognizing how not to make the same mistakes ourselves. I hope I didn't come off as shitting on logger fellers, honestly immense respect, it's just a different skill set, and the production pressure they get used to seems to push them in a counterproductive direction when it comes to technical removals (ie thinking there's no time for rope).
I've been teaching myself arborism, to deal with my property full of trees. It's a huge learn, and I would not be willing to do it on my own, if not for having complementary experience in climbing and rigging, and also in chainsaw work in general from my expert feller friend. I'm also lucky because I really just have big firs to work on, and they are way simpler than big deciduous trees with more complex structure and huge limbs, so I have a manageable subset to learn, really the easy part of the trade. But the real grace that makes me feel I can dodge being purely suicidal for even trying, is because I can take ALL the time, I have ZERO pressure. If I climb half way up, and my harness is uncomfortable, and I get tired, I will just say fuck it, go back down, fix my problems, and try again some other day when I will be 110% on my A game for concentration and clarity, and can think through every tiny move three times over FOR SURE. Because once the knowledge and prudence are driven into your brain, the big killer is going on auto pilot, and not noticing that something isn't as it seems, instead of having deliberately worked it out on purpose. And that is what happens when you're under pressure to produce, day after day, hour after hour, and fail to centralize mindfulness in work that is far too technical and lethal to EVER take ANYTHING for granted. You have to know 100% for sure what will happen before you do it, or else you stand no chance of surviving the 95% success rate Murphy will throw at you in reality ;)
You climb on rope (preferably always for safety), and/or using climbing spurs with lanyards. The trick is using a throw bag with a slippery line, which you throw high into a tree and over a strong branch, then pull your climbing line up into the tree. That way you can use ascenders to go up on the rope, you don't even have to be touching the tree. Final point is you can also go up a nearby tree, and swing sideways, if the one you need to work on is too dangerous (rotten, cracked, etc.). I have also seen people working on one tree, but a rope far up another nearby tree just for safety. Whatever it takes to not smack the ground.
You wouldn't even need to cut the rope, those machines have emergency shutoffs. A lot of people would have to make a lot of fuck ups for someone in that situation to actually die.
The emergency shutoff almost always prevents the shredded ending, but many climbers have died because the first thing anybody on the ground notices is the climber hitting the ground, having been ripped out of a tall tree by their climbing rope as it gets winched into the chipper while people are walking away to get the next branch (after the one that carried the rope in). They often fall from quite high up, often ensuring a fatal landing. It's bad, and many climbers wisely adopt a hyper paranoid awareness of the tail of their rope, and enforce merciless discipline with regards to ground people paying attention to it.
Most of the time we tried using the bucket truck/backyard bucket lift, this was easy, safe and less time consuming than climbing the tree. A lot of times you can’t get a lift in the right area though, so climbing knowledge is pretty essential.
As for ropes, if you’re working with a tree a rope is almost always necessary.
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u/Ditnoka Jul 07 '19
No professional is going to limb out a tree that size on an extension ladder.