A 25 meter tall Nordic spruce, dead and dried-out but still standing is felled by gusts topping 30m/s. It lands at a 45 degree angle, its top third caught in a cleft in a birch tree and its bottom end a rotted stump lodged in 1½ meter of snow. The end touching the ground is ½ a meter in diameter.
How and where do you cut to to:
A) Dislodge the entire tree?
B) Do so without danger to yourself?
C) Using only manual tools.
The difference between my model and the ONS is, if you mess up when applying it, you personally /will/ get hurt.
Can you wait for the snow to melt? A bulldozer comes to mind, to push them both over. Or can you cut away any portion of the spruce 'above' the cleft? And then cut away any portion of the spruce near the base? Is there anyone who wants the wood? Boatbuilders love spruce. Or maybe rig up some kind of winch to pull the entire mess over. note-I too am struggling with a large fir tree, alive, unfortunately on the property line, which a neighboring property wants to 'acquire' as they build a giant 4plex low income housing just 10 ft from my house. They will likely 'limb up' one side as they construct their monstrosity, thereby making the tree more likely to fall into my house. So, legally, it would serve me to have them take posession of the tree, so that if it falls on my house it would be on their dime. Ah, trees. I do love them dearly but they are some trouble some times. Best (ps I do not look at Substack responses but my direct email is my name at protonmail dot com)
Well. . . hiring bulldozer would be expensive and would require mowing down lots of trees in the way, plus usually one would use a harvester instead, which i'm proud to say is a swedish/finnish invention:
No, I have to make to with rope, an axe and a curved saw on a long pole (kind of like a bill-hook but with a sawblade).
What you do is, you secure a rope around the bole above where you'll make the cut and tie the rope off around a nearby healthy tree strong enough to take the weight. That way, you know where the bit stuck in the cleft will go if it dislodges and fall.
Then you use the curved saw on the stick to cut out a wedge on the underside of the slanting tree, say 1/3 of its thickness in depth. When that is done you use the axe and hew into it opposite to the cut.
This ensures that when the tree snaps, the bit you've hewn off plops to the ground with the axe being wedged or worse, being punted by the force involved.
Now, normally I'd use a chainsaw for both cuts but I'm out of mineral oil and the chain needs sharpening.
The tree will become firewood, seeing as its a dead tree that's dried out so I just need to cut it to pieces and split those into firewood.
I don't know property law where you live but I'd advice to have the tree felled if it's a concern that it might hit someone's building - it would depend on if the tree is health, if its situated so it catches the wind, and so on with lots of factors.
If the tree is on your side, can they really touch it at all without your permission?
Thanks much....understood re the available equipment, I too am a hand tool maiden. I think my fence (1960s) was erected to include the tree in my yard, but that was when the tree was half the diameter it is now. Its a healthy tree, well rooted, would probs cost 3 grand to have it cut down in sections, no good direction (now) to have it felled.
Arrgg. I will have to get the squirrel that planted it to chip in, eh?
Is three grand 300 or 3 000? Because the first sounds normal but the second. . .yikes.
Yeah, it's always a hassle when there's buildings and powerlines and phonelines (not so many of those nowadays) and what have you around. A neighbour has a similar problem, two huge trees smack bang between his summerhouse and the garage. In the other two directions, there's a road and my outhouse. He'll either have to hire out, using an insured company, or get permission to close the road for several hours (fat chance) and do it himself.
Some guys who take down trees will give you a better price if they get to take the wood.
Way back when I was a teen, I got shown how to use explosives or electric current to cut a tree. Do not try. Absolutely not. It is insanely dangerous because its unpredicable.
I think your best bet would be company that are insured against accidents like the tree falling the wrong way. Maybe the ones doing the construction and you could go halfsies?
I think it would be 3,000.....its about 24 inch dia and about 75 ft tall...and 75 years old. Douglas Fir, what all the houses in this town (portland or) are built from. I would want to get it planed up and dried, but thats just me. I would miss it for sure. best
I wonder what would happen if you looked at the distribution of age-at-death (a generalized “life expectancy”) over time. If its central location is declining, then there’s “excess death”. No doubt insurance actuaries have such things, and have a powerful incentive to be correct.
Theoretically, if a population is exposed to a highly infectious novel virus that preferentially kills the elderly and infirm (those most at risk of death during the next 5 years), isn’t the expected outcome a lower than normal mortality rate over the next 5 years?
Now, the peculiar thing to me is that if you do not see the expected suppression in deaths, the natural explanation is that either the virus was not as lethal as you thought or that it has long-term longevity-suppressing effects even among survivors. Both seem to be to be reasonable accusations to lob at Covid. It also is reasonable, in this case, to say that the pandemic response was unequivocally bad for public health, increasing obesity, depression, drug abuse, anxiety, lack of physical activity/time outdoors, and social isolation.
I honestly am not sure whether it is the latter that the data seeks to obscure— just how bad our public health response was even pre-jab— or whether the vaccine is continuing to have a significant population-level effect on mortality. (It has compromised the health of many who took it, but modern medicine is great at prolonging the lives of people who have heart attacks and strokes— I suspect if it were the jab alone we’d have to wait a decade or more to see a clear signal in the mortality data. Which is why the claims of “safe and effective,” even if they turned out to be true, were a lie at the time.)
Here's how I model expectations using math:
A 25 meter tall Nordic spruce, dead and dried-out but still standing is felled by gusts topping 30m/s. It lands at a 45 degree angle, its top third caught in a cleft in a birch tree and its bottom end a rotted stump lodged in 1½ meter of snow. The end touching the ground is ½ a meter in diameter.
How and where do you cut to to:
A) Dislodge the entire tree?
B) Do so without danger to yourself?
C) Using only manual tools.
The difference between my model and the ONS is, if you mess up when applying it, you personally /will/ get hurt.
Can you wait for the snow to melt? A bulldozer comes to mind, to push them both over. Or can you cut away any portion of the spruce 'above' the cleft? And then cut away any portion of the spruce near the base? Is there anyone who wants the wood? Boatbuilders love spruce. Or maybe rig up some kind of winch to pull the entire mess over. note-I too am struggling with a large fir tree, alive, unfortunately on the property line, which a neighboring property wants to 'acquire' as they build a giant 4plex low income housing just 10 ft from my house. They will likely 'limb up' one side as they construct their monstrosity, thereby making the tree more likely to fall into my house. So, legally, it would serve me to have them take posession of the tree, so that if it falls on my house it would be on their dime. Ah, trees. I do love them dearly but they are some trouble some times. Best (ps I do not look at Substack responses but my direct email is my name at protonmail dot com)
Well. . . hiring bulldozer would be expensive and would require mowing down lots of trees in the way, plus usually one would use a harvester instead, which i'm proud to say is a swedish/finnish invention:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvester_(forestry)
No, I have to make to with rope, an axe and a curved saw on a long pole (kind of like a bill-hook but with a sawblade).
What you do is, you secure a rope around the bole above where you'll make the cut and tie the rope off around a nearby healthy tree strong enough to take the weight. That way, you know where the bit stuck in the cleft will go if it dislodges and fall.
Then you use the curved saw on the stick to cut out a wedge on the underside of the slanting tree, say 1/3 of its thickness in depth. When that is done you use the axe and hew into it opposite to the cut.
This ensures that when the tree snaps, the bit you've hewn off plops to the ground with the axe being wedged or worse, being punted by the force involved.
Now, normally I'd use a chainsaw for both cuts but I'm out of mineral oil and the chain needs sharpening.
The tree will become firewood, seeing as its a dead tree that's dried out so I just need to cut it to pieces and split those into firewood.
I don't know property law where you live but I'd advice to have the tree felled if it's a concern that it might hit someone's building - it would depend on if the tree is health, if its situated so it catches the wind, and so on with lots of factors.
If the tree is on your side, can they really touch it at all without your permission?
Thanks much....understood re the available equipment, I too am a hand tool maiden. I think my fence (1960s) was erected to include the tree in my yard, but that was when the tree was half the diameter it is now. Its a healthy tree, well rooted, would probs cost 3 grand to have it cut down in sections, no good direction (now) to have it felled.
Arrgg. I will have to get the squirrel that planted it to chip in, eh?
Is three grand 300 or 3 000? Because the first sounds normal but the second. . .yikes.
Yeah, it's always a hassle when there's buildings and powerlines and phonelines (not so many of those nowadays) and what have you around. A neighbour has a similar problem, two huge trees smack bang between his summerhouse and the garage. In the other two directions, there's a road and my outhouse. He'll either have to hire out, using an insured company, or get permission to close the road for several hours (fat chance) and do it himself.
Some guys who take down trees will give you a better price if they get to take the wood.
Way back when I was a teen, I got shown how to use explosives or electric current to cut a tree. Do not try. Absolutely not. It is insanely dangerous because its unpredicable.
I think your best bet would be company that are insured against accidents like the tree falling the wrong way. Maybe the ones doing the construction and you could go halfsies?
I think it would be 3,000.....its about 24 inch dia and about 75 ft tall...and 75 years old. Douglas Fir, what all the houses in this town (portland or) are built from. I would want to get it planed up and dried, but thats just me. I would miss it for sure. best
I wonder what would happen if you looked at the distribution of age-at-death (a generalized “life expectancy”) over time. If its central location is declining, then there’s “excess death”. No doubt insurance actuaries have such things, and have a powerful incentive to be correct.
They’re not dead. They’re just resting while pining for the fjords.
Theoretically, if a population is exposed to a highly infectious novel virus that preferentially kills the elderly and infirm (those most at risk of death during the next 5 years), isn’t the expected outcome a lower than normal mortality rate over the next 5 years?
Now, the peculiar thing to me is that if you do not see the expected suppression in deaths, the natural explanation is that either the virus was not as lethal as you thought or that it has long-term longevity-suppressing effects even among survivors. Both seem to be to be reasonable accusations to lob at Covid. It also is reasonable, in this case, to say that the pandemic response was unequivocally bad for public health, increasing obesity, depression, drug abuse, anxiety, lack of physical activity/time outdoors, and social isolation.
I honestly am not sure whether it is the latter that the data seeks to obscure— just how bad our public health response was even pre-jab— or whether the vaccine is continuing to have a significant population-level effect on mortality. (It has compromised the health of many who took it, but modern medicine is great at prolonging the lives of people who have heart attacks and strokes— I suspect if it were the jab alone we’d have to wait a decade or more to see a clear signal in the mortality data. Which is why the claims of “safe and effective,” even if they turned out to be true, were a lie at the time.)