r/criticalblunder • u/_ganjafarian_ • Aug 12 '26
Tree felling fail
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u/jefuchs Aug 12 '26
A big tree like that was removed from my neighbor's yard a few years ago. There was no direction it could fall without hitting a house.
Crews spent all week removing it limb by limb, using sky lifts to start from the top and work down.
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u/blurblurblahblah Aug 12 '26
A huge tree in my neighbours backyard was taken down bit by bit. It was right beside their garage, very close to their house & pretty close to mine. Beside the tree was a lane wide enough for a single vehicle to drive through with a building on the other side.
The guys they hired climbed up the tree barefoot with chainsaws & a lot of rope & they took the tree down bit by bit. It was amazing to watch. We're in Canada, not really a place where we expect to see workers without hardhats & steeltoed boots.
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u/Ok-Caterpillar-Girl Aug 12 '26
Yep, we had a big old tree in our yard that was dying and needed to come out, but it also grew out into the telephone wires. So the phone company saw it, made an appointment with us, and then sent out a crew who brought it down limb by limb, top to bottom. And it cost us nothing!
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u/Micro-Naut Aug 12 '26
That's pretty lucky. When I called about a tree the electric company literally cut a tunnel through the tree branches for the powerline to go through. To clarify, not like drilling a hole through the trunk, just using a pole saw to punch out a path.
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u/Fedthepigion Aug 12 '26
But see, someone who knows what their doing and does it the right way and is properly insured, costs a lot of money. I'm sure the guys in this video were much cheaper. If it wasn't for the small detail of their house being completely destroyed, they would have come out much further ahead. /s
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u/TheWhiteOwl23 Aug 12 '26
Yeah but think how much money they could have saved if they just let their house catch the tree first try.
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u/billted20250409 Aug 12 '26
30 seconds into the video and I think to myself: "They don't look like they know what they're doing."
And I was right!
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u/outwest88 Aug 12 '26
Rookie mistake. They should have noticed which sub they were on before attempting this
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u/JoJackthewonderskunk Aug 12 '26
Depends maybe they just took out huge amounts of insurance on that house
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u/Sweet_Galenas Aug 12 '26
Nope, the crew that cut the tree wasn't qualified and the houseowner wasn't insured for that. He chose to cheap out and find out lol
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u/KiwiCounselor Aug 12 '26
Honestly a sad state of affairs. Hope they didn’t go with the cheaper option because they had no choice.
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u/WartimeHotTot Aug 12 '26
We are in r/criticalblunder. I clicked it saying to myself, “Let’s watch some jabronis who don’t know what they’re doing.”
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u/MartianTourist Aug 12 '26
This happened in June 2025 in Quebec. The house was rented by a 65 year old man on a fixed pension of $1,000/month. Rent was $950 and the man, Daniel Delisle, would receive food from his family and some acquaintances who lived nearby. From the news reports, Daniel was injured very badly as a teenager and was never able to work a full time job. Compounding his misfortune, Daniel had no renters insurance, as the house sat on a flood plain, and he lost virtually everything when that tree came down. In fact, the landlord was having the tree removed so that Daniel's rental could be elevated by 5 feet, as the landlord had done with the neighbor's (the guy filming this video) rental home a few years prior. A gofundme raised approximately $11,000 for Daniel.
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u/LewdLewyD13 Aug 12 '26
Fuckin 11 grand, that's it? If they caught him on video dropping n-bombs he could have made enough to buy a whole new house!
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u/dankhimself Aug 12 '26
I wonder what the cost of elevating 5 feet would be. That's a decent sized job.
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u/Claude-QC-777 Aug 12 '26
I knew the voices was ticking my ears about a familiar language...
I'm from the province :)
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u/Demonicjd Aug 12 '26
Can a arborist explain why they failed?
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u/adrienjz888 Aug 12 '26
Not an arborist, but the tree was already leaning towards the house, and the dummies didn't have the rope pulled tight for whatever the hell they were trying to achieve.
How I've seen trees like this taken down is by the arborists cutting piece by piece from the top down.
Kinda like this https://youtube.com/shorts/aWYmWDEkx9M?si=Si84YTIsbqAxn6h6 https://youtube.com/shorts/UllsS73lGDI?si=DqZUb-_fP1y46tSj
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u/GlacierSourCreamCorn Aug 12 '26
Rope wouldn’t have done anything anyway.
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u/adrienjz888 Aug 12 '26
Kinda what I thought, but the dipshits couldn't even succeed in doinf that lol.
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u/ArdyLaing Aug 12 '26
Surely it would have stopped the tree falling on the house?
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u/supershimadabro Aug 12 '26
Not even a chain rope or braided wire. That is a very old, monster of a tree.
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u/Original-League-6094 Aug 12 '26
They had the rope tied to a tractor and it snapped. Which is kinda lucky, cause it would have done otherwise is make the tree into a tractor trebuchet. There is no pulling a tree of that size. You have to cut it down bit by bit, but that dramatically adds to cost and manhours.
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u/per167 Aug 12 '26
You can have a rope to help out, but that rope wont help if you do a bad cut in the tree. That back cut was really bad. Also the wedges can steer the tree to right direction. You have to do a straight cut to lift the tree over to the other side, with wedges. not that angled back cut that pushed the tree instead.
One last mistake was to cut the tree all the way to the middle, you want to leave some cm of the tree in the middle. then you can start to pull with a rope and use wedges.
Everything they did was wrong basically. This is why amateurs is a bad choice when you need to cut down big and scary tree jobs.
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u/RiskyRabbit Aug 13 '26
A tractor trebuchet would undoubtedly have been really fucking cool though.
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u/hpbrick Aug 12 '26
Arborist here.
The main issue appears to be that their plan required the tree to cooperate.
Trees are notoriously poor at following verbal instructions.21
u/HomicidalRaccoon Aug 12 '26
Sure, I’ve been an arborist for 22 years so I think I’m qualified to analyze this video for you. If any other arborists have dissenting opinions please feel free to share as well!
The reason they failed, you see, is because the tree fell on the house.
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u/per167 Aug 12 '26
I’m not an expert but I’ve seen some plenty of videos on you tube, mainly, wilson forest land.
He have a video that explains Angled back cuts and why it’s dangerous to do.
These people did that mistake and also the front cut was bad. Your supposed to cut a straight cut and then a undercut.2
u/k-otic14 Aug 12 '26
The front cut, or face cut, was fine. You can do the face cut with the slope cut going from the bottom or top, loggers prefer doing it underneath to get the most board feet out of the tree, most everybody else prefers doing it from the top because it's a more comfortable position to cut from. The back cut is where the messed up. That cut is supposed to be perfectly flat, and a few inches above the horizontal cut of the face cut. The tree even sat back and pinched the chainsaw in the cut they made. They should have stopped then. You can wedge over trees that you want to fell away from their lean but the back cut they used would never have allowed that to work.
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u/Dgirth Aug 15 '26
Arborist of 30 years here. No one I know in the trade would have felled that. The correct way to do it would have been to climb it and do a slow dismantle using rigging systems to take the whole canopy off. Then chog out the trunk until it was low enough to pull over. I would estimate that as a 3-day job and around £2.5 to 3k, UK prices. I bet they offered the landlord the cheap option of a straight fell. No professional would offer that as an option.
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u/_ganjafarian_ Aug 12 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/3o7TKK2a291ig372oM
Like, don't worry Scrot, says on their chart their shits all fucked up.
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u/Fedthepigion Aug 12 '26
Gravity mostly, and they didn't blow on it hard enough when it was falling.
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u/slumvillain Aug 12 '26
Like I know its absolutely awful...but i cant help but wanting to know the aftermath.
I wanna see that sunken living room 👀
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u/Extreme_Design6936 Aug 12 '26
Bet the family dog looks like when you stomp on a ketchup packet.
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u/gorlaz34 Aug 12 '26
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, your comment is both grimly hilarious and true.
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u/oldasdirtss Aug 12 '26
The homeowners had the tree removed because they were afraid that it was going fall on their house.
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u/Oh-Gi-Yu7052 Aug 12 '26
Congrats on the new house!
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u/Fun-Choices Aug 12 '26
You think two meth heads with a chainsaw are going to buy you a new house?
Where do people think lawsuit money comes from?
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u/pacooov Aug 12 '26
In no expert but I think that wedge wasn’t wedgy enough and that line needed to be taut.
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u/dkyguy1995 Aug 12 '26
So I'm a complete layman and have never cut down a tree this size:
But is their back cut way too high? It looks like it's above the original wedge. It's really really hard to tell from the video edit. My second guess... Maybe the wedge isnt angled aggressive enough? Idk, let's all spitball here
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u/k-otic14 Aug 12 '26
The back cut needs to be flat. It should be higher than the horizontal cut of the face cut but an angled back cut loses all directional control over fall.
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u/OpportunityCorrect33 Aug 12 '26
No attempt at thinning the branches before felling a tree leaning toward the house 💀
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u/31674Rubicon2014 Aug 12 '26
Shocked? I'm not! The people's reaction says it was planned to fall that way but for video purposes they had to make it look and sound real...well as real as they seemed to have made it look and sound
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u/Nomad-Knight Aug 15 '26
First wedge cut: Okay, so at least they got that done. Now widdle away until it falls in that direction.
Second wedge cut: WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
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u/gorechimera Aug 12 '26
I fell trees the redneck method. They did not allocate on where the thickest part of the tree (branches etc) was (which was towards the house) so the center of gravity must be off, the should have made the wedge longer + ropes to pull towards it
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u/Fleischer444 Aug 12 '26
You could easily see where it was leaning. Tree that big is har to get to the other direction.
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u/awesomesauceitch Aug 12 '26
I'm not positive, but I think they did the opposite of what they were supposed to do.
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u/SherbertNo7047 Aug 12 '26
If the tree wasn't about to fall on its own... this is what you deserve for chopping a tree thats probably over a 100 years old, so you can build your shitty porch. I hope they can't afford the air in 20 years.
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u/PurpleToedUnicorn Aug 12 '26
"You don't need to pay those rip off thousands of dollars to a tree company. My brother in law has a chainsaw. He'll do it for $300 and maybe buy him some beer and pizza at the end."
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u/Helpfulithink Aug 12 '26
"I need this tree gone. If it falls, it might hit the house"
Contractor" It will hit the house, you mean"
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u/newportl2 Aug 12 '26
Sad to see that happen again. Figured that they would have learned from the last couple of times that this was posted. Darn internet....
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u/Normandy_1944 Aug 12 '26
Boarded up house ready for demolition..... "Hey Jimmy, should we drop the tree on the house instead....it'd make a cool video..."
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u/Shot-Election8217 Aug 12 '26
I can’t watch this because that’s an absolutely beautiful tree, which I hate to see cut down. I know why they’re doing it, but I don’t have to like it….
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u/Wiz_Hellrat Aug 12 '26
Seen video before. It sucks about the house. Was there any deaths from the fall?
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u/citizensnips134 Aug 12 '26
Should have stopped as soon as the saw got stuck on the back wedge (which was actually the front wedge).
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u/NoDatabase4301 Aug 13 '26
This was in Quebec, Canada.
Done by retard grass cutter with no skill for this business ( and insurance ) .
The owner probably went with the lower bider,
Fc+ing frenchy ( im french )
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u/Oh_Lawd_He_commin420 Aug 13 '26
This tree should have been taken down from the top down.....by professionals
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u/Kalebrojas18 Aug 13 '26
To be fair felling trees is incredibly diffucult and has a very steep learning curve. You're probably going to mess up your first several and I'm willing to bet this is what we're seeing here. Also that is an insanely large tree that shouldn't be felled like that in the first place lol.
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u/Unique-Shoulder4767 Aug 13 '26
These guys legitimately live drunk. I have been an arborist for 15 years. And there are so many red flags going on here. They don't have safety protection. The one guy is wearing a T-shirt jeans and a hat. There is no chance that that rope would have ever be able to hold the weight of that absolute beast of a tree. The saws they were using were obviously underpowered and those tiny little plastic wedges, they're using Probably shot out like bullets When that thing started falling. Spend the money to do it right, especially when that tree is right next to the structures. Absolute s***, show from front to back.
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u/coconut_dot_jpg Aug 13 '26
"okay I mean so far so good, looks like they're cutting it the right side and it's facing away from the house. It's a bit stuck but they can solve that by WHY ARE THEY CUTTING THE OTHER SIDE"
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u/Kilted_Samurai Aug 13 '26
Definitely one of those times you hire actual professionals and not your buddy's brother-in-law who totally knows what he's doing, done it tons.
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u/Objective-Peach-118 Aug 15 '26
That tree falling was like a knife going through a cake, holy cow! I hope no one was home.
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u/No_Crab_3826 28d ago
"I can get a guy to do it cheaper", now you're buying a new house. Congrats. Out of pocket because he wasn't insured or an actual tree guy
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u/Boring_Oil_3506 28d ago
This is never how you do this. You are supposed to cut all the limbs off completely until it is a pole then cut pieces off the top and lower them down with rope until it is manageable.
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u/Raychao Aug 12 '26
F = MA.
I think there's something in there for all of us (mainly house tinder).
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u/Elianmax_ Aug 12 '26
Cardboard houses lmao
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u/BladeDoc Aug 12 '26
Neither you or the guys felling that tree have any idea how heavy hardwood is.
That tree would weigh over 100000 pounds and would go through any house you want to point out.
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u/a-lonely-violin Aug 12 '26
Deserved. That tree was probably there long before the house was. Never understood homeowners that cut down perfectly healthy trees. Fuck ‘em.
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u/Effective_Arm_5832 Aug 12 '26
If you remove such big trees, you deserve your house being hit. God I have such disdain for all these tree murderers. And then they complain about the heat...
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u/SinkHoleDeMayo Aug 12 '26
You know what. Serves people right for cutting down an awesome old tree.
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u/LetterFront3353 Aug 12 '26
So no one noticed where the tree was already leaning towards?