Mighty Timber! (Part 1)

Hope I don’t get any hate mails as a result of this posting. But today we started cutting down the 2 redwood trees in my backyard. I took a couple days off to “supervise” the work. I really didn’t have to, but I think it keeps the crew on their toes when someone is at the property watching over them and it actually really somewhat fascinating to see them work. Well, to me anyways, others could probably careless. I’ve always found construction / heavy equipment curiously interesting. It’s certainly not something I would do myself though even if I knew what the proper techniques are, which you definitely have to, in order to cut down 75~80’ tall trees that are right up against the house without damaging them. My brief 2-3 weeks working as a “College Pro Painter” one college summer has convinced me outsourcing hard manual labor is the smart thing to do!

9:30 AM

Their progress is super fast, seems their powerful gas chainsaws cut through the wood like tofu. It makes me envious with my puny electric chain saw which tends to break down when I even just try to tackle an occasional fallen branch.

So far the crew has been excellent. They showed up early, around 8:35 am when they originally said 9 am, so I’m glad I got here early 8:00 am. I wanted to get here early to post the signs (the tree removal permits has to be posted close to the sidewalk) and to take some pictures of the “before” scene. My original intent was to make sure if something does go wrong, I would have picture proofs and things. Hopefully I don’t have to use the pictures for that purpose. I am taking plenty of pictures though and it’s going to make some great blog material. Anyways, been watching them work the past half hour or so before stopping in to write things down in the blog. They’ve already got a good chunk of the branches trimmed off one of the redwood already. Time for me to head out to the backyard and survey the progress!

10:55 am

The crew has basically cut down one tree completely, and is working on cutting the pieces into small enough pieces so they can remove it. It appears that they’re planning on just hauling away all the stumps as debris, which is a bit of a shame, as they’re probably quite valuable, being redwood and all. But alas, so it goes, it’s not possible to fall the entire tree in the setting, and without the trunk available in long pieces, it’s probably not useful to anyone except perhaps craftsman/artist. By the way, I’m glad I did take the day off completely, as I’m trapped here with no way to get out of the garage. Tomorrow I’ll be smarter and not park inside the garage but somewhere along the side streets. Also getting rather hungry, looks like time for me to walk over to Jack in the Box or something.

12:35 pm -After lunch

The crew took only a short break and has started working one tree number 2. I think by now I’ve seen enough to describe the process:

The whole process/method is very interesting. There are 4 persons in the crew, one guy is the main tree climbing/cutting dude, and another guy helps him with the ropes/pulley. Then two more guys are at ground level, pulling away the cut down branches and hauling everything away.

To start things off, the climber dude goes way up the tree, I would say probably about two third the way up at least, where he sets up a pulley point. Then, his saw is attached to the rope and sent up to him. He then actually comes down to about only one quarter of the way up the tree, where the branches start to sprout out, and starts cutting from there.

Each branch is first attached to the rope (I have no idea how they tie/hook it, but somehow it doesn’t come loose) before cutting. The guy controlling the rope/pulley makes sure it doesn’t fall to far down and crash into things. Then the 2 others guys come and actually pull it out and away from the house, where the may do some additional sawing so that it can be hauled to the front where there is a big truck with the machine that chews up all the branches and even tree trunks, provided they’re cut down to manageable sizes. When it’s basically all cut down, everyone chips in cutting the huge trunk pieces into more manageable pieces and hauls them away to be wood chipped.

2:25 pm

I just watched the crew work for another 25 minutes. Tony moved a couple more people over here, I guess he had some guys on another job in the morning and that’s done, so now I have 6 guys here working the tail off. I must say they seem motivated. It’s probably because they get paid the fixed amount, and the faster they get done, the faster the get to go home and relax. It might also be because they want to beat the rush hour, since my street is actually a pretty busy street during rush hours and having the huge wood chipper truck blocking half the street could cause a pretty big traffic jam.

3:00AM Midnight Owl again.. Just posting what I wrote while over there (before my laptop ran out of battery). Wait for part 2 for more details and the conclusion of this tree removal job!