I once made a very similar mistake. The October Surprise storm had killed a bunch of trees in the Buffalo area and there was a pine in our back yard. I decided I would just trim some of the branches off and put up a ladder to start working on it. I hadn’t even gotten the whole way up the ladder before the whole tree started coming down. My brilliant first instinct was that I should somehow figure out how to prop it up. Fortunately the rest of my brain kicked in and I jumped out of the way before the tree came down neatly in the middle of our yard causing no damage to anything and providing a little bit extra fire wood over the next few years. I’m sure my language and tone at the time were similar to this gentleman’s.
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Chapter Two: He tries removing the stump!
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any tree taller than your roofline…hire a tree service. worth every penny.
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Ah, but see, that’s where you’re precisely wrong. It’s not a metaphor for 2020. It IS 2020.
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In the circumstances, I’d say he said some very good words.
Yeah, about that. . .
Looking more closely, I see he went off the rails on the third cut. The idea is that, when the third cut is finished, there is a strip of uncut fibers still extending from the root, past the cuts, all the way up the tree. These fibers act as a hinge to direct the fall of the tree, surviving until well after it’s committed to a particular direction.
Our protagonist committed two grave errors in making his third cut. First, he made it way too high. It’s near the top of the long wedge of trunk removed in the first cut. It should be near the bottom, around the same level as the second cut. Second, and worse, he let his third cut pass all the way through the tree, so that there was no guiding hinge and the direction of fall was determined by factors unrelated to the would-be arborist’s actions (largely the tree’s initial lean and weight distribution and the wind).
The Yosemite Sam bit was golden, though.
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My favorite part of this whole thing is the poor sap with the rope running in the opposite direction as if he’s going to redirect it somehow. Classic.
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Yeah, exactly, I’m confused as to what he thought would happen - that it would fall on the neighbor’s house?
Also it helps to hire someone who isn’t a complete goddamn idiot.
Not unreasonable if he actually cut up the tree and took it away - the insurance went after him for the roof repair costs, so he paid for that. Sounds like he did everything but take the stump out, and it was ultimately the homeowner’s own damn fault for hiring their “lawn guy" (I’m guessing his skill set involved operating a lawn mower and blower and that’s about it, as far as they knew).
Yeah, though in this case they outsourced the overconfident incompetence by hiring someone else - the guy who mowed their lawn. Because cutting grass and cutting down a big tree are exactly the same thing.
Although according to the homeowner who hired him, there was no direction the tree could have fallen without damaging something, so I’d say he went off the rails even earlier than that…
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Is it, though?
Even if their insurance reimbursed them for the repair costs it’s still a pain in the ass to have to bring in a contractor to fix the roof your lawn guy smashed through his incompetence.
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Do I see a guy in the road at 0:01 scurrying away? Almost looks like he had a rope in his hands and let go. Was mystery-man tasked with making the tree fall a certain way? Is mystery-man the object of cussy-Mc-man’s wrath?
Should have hired this guy:
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I’ve cut down a fair number of trees.
The tree is going to fall in a particular direction, based on how it leans and how the heavy branches on it are situated. You can shift that direction somewhat if you use a winch and some strong cable (some idiot hanging onto a rope does not count and won’t have any effect) but there’s a very strict limit on how far you can change the direction of it’s natural fall. The more it leans or is weighted, the less you can change it. The big key is figuring out how it wants to fall before you start cutting, and if there’s any chance it can land on something you don’t want destroyed, hire a damn professional who has the proper equipment (which may include a crane) who knows what the fuck they are doing who will send some climbers up to cut it from the top down.
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Why do some people think they can do anything an expert can do?
I don’t get it.
(This is a deep cut and I’d be amazed if anyone got it, though chances here are probably higher than in most corners of the internet but this reminds me of the exploits of Skeeter 2, the oldest Tyler and the corrugated garden shed)
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This would be so much better with a scene-ending musical hook from The Brady Bunch.
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And yet he still hired the guy to do it. Was the owner at the scene watching what he later claims to have been inevitable?
There’s a reason proper tree surgeons take down tall trunks in urban areas (i.e. anywhere near houses) in sections. If the lawnmower guy did not turn up with a groundsman and climbing equipment, to take the trunk down in sections, it would be obvious he was going to fuck up, from the get go. I can only assume the owner was not present - otherwise he’s probably as culpable, if he was there and let it proceed.
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Everybody knows the proper way to bring down a tree is with explosives!
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right? Where was that going to fall that didn’t crash into something?
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Payment? I would have sued him for attempted murder.
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Riiight down the middle!
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“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! Dad gummit! Phooey! Phooey, I say!”
Inside the house: “Oh you m----------r! Ya gon’ die now!”
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