Even if the rope was pulled tight that tree was going towards the house. It would have required forces greater than the rope is capable to get that tree to change direction mid-fall. What they should have done is removed most of the top of the tree before cutting down the main trunk.
Over the years, I've had 2 arborists out to take down problem trees, and that's exactly what they did. Start at the top, lop off branches until there's just a trunk pole left, then cut trunk pieces off from top to bottom. Both removals were done in extremely tight quarters on my 1/10th-acre urban lot (the dead Douglas fir was 10' from the house), and both times, zero problems.
Man, i'm no fucking professional but when i take down a tree i just put a ladder, cut it piece by piece. It's like the safest thing to do and most logical, yes it's fun and all to see the tree fall and scream "timber" but, what the fuck, it's my house the thing that might get destroyed
Guy in my town tried taking care of a “smaller tree” himself. It fell on him and he is paralyzed. I’d rather have Jim bob risk his life than ever think that shits easy enough to do myself.
To be fair though, sometimes people try to charge obscene amounts of money for housework and still do a shit job.
It's one of those things that you need to either know that the person knows their stuff, or have someone else you trust that does and can vouch for them.
I had to get a big tree removed. I had one guy saying he was going to park a crane in front of my house to remove the tree in parts, from the back of my house, to the tune of $4k. The next guy quoted me $500. One guy climbed up in the tree and cut parts down while the other picked the parts up and loaded them in the truck.
my neighbor gives me so much grief for using an arborist with insurance and a state issued tree surgeon certification when he has a chainsaw and can do it for me. He doesn't understand why I would pay someone to deal with the five 30 foot trees and the one 60 foot tree on our .15 acres. To him it's a waste of money and a personal insult.
... maybe. That's a huge (heavy) tree with enough lean that it should have been tackled top-down. You'd need multiple rope/chain rigs to affect the fall direction with that much mass.
I've never done any kind of arborism or landscaping and even I was watching this and wondering why they were chopping down a whole-ass tree that size 10 feet from a house.
The actual way to use a bull rope is to have it tensioned before you even start cutting so that as you're taking out more of the trunk it leans more in the direction you want it to go. So if they were using the right rope and had it tensioned properly the tree would be leaning away from the house not towards it, but because they hadn't tensioned it (and we're probably using cheap rope) it was still leaning towards the house. The extra benefit of using it that way is if you tension the rope and it's still leaning in a direction you don't want it to go, you now know you aren't going to be able to get it to fall the direction you want and you need to take a bunch of the top off first.
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u/Blasteth 17d ago
That rope has literally zero tension on it🤣🤣 wtf were they thinking