A Close Call For A Faller

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slowp

slowp

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I heard about this close call the other day. I decided to share it.

An experienced faller was working on near-vertical ground. He was working on cutting a 36” diameter white fir and sending it down the hill, towards the landing. He’d faced the tree, started the back cut, had wedges in, and had stopped to check the bar clearance to the hinge on the other side. He left his saw in, and idling. Somehow, he lost his footing and tumbled about 100 feet down the hill losing hardhat and wedges in the process.

Whilst doing that assessment that I think we are all familiar with--can I move this, any blood, am I all here, he heard the tree start to go. (there was a bit of wind) He took off on all fours across the hill as fast as he could. There was no time to see where the tree was going--just time to move and hope you are out of the way. He made it. The tree landed where he had been laying.

The injuries? Sounds like scrapes and bruises. The saw survived, hardhat was found, but wedges were lost.


Pay attention to where you put those feet!
 
slowp said:
I heard about this close call the other day. I decided to share it.

An experienced faller was working on near-vertical ground. He was working on cutting a 36” diameter white fir and sending it down the hill, towards the landing. He’d faced the tree, started the back cut, had wedges in, and had stopped to check the bar clearance to the hinge on the other side. He left his saw in, and idling. Somehow, he lost his footing and tumbled about 100 feet down the hill losing hardhat and wedges in the process.

Whilst doing that assessment that I think we are all familiar with--can I move this, any blood, am I all here, he heard the tree start to go. (there was a bit of wind) He took off on all fours across the hill as fast as he could. There was no time to see where the tree was going--just time to move and hope you are out of the way. He made it. The tree landed where he had been laying.

The injuries? Sounds like scrapes and bruises. The saw survived, hardhat was found, but wedges were lost.


Pay attention to where you put those feet!
Click to expand...

Damn, talk about a surge of adrenaline!
 
It's easy to get tunnel vision when you're on a roll (pardon the pun) falling tree after tree.
 
On the other point of view that's something very unlikely: to lay down on the ground and fall a tree onto yourself.

Anything may and will happen out there.
 
Gologit said:
We'd like to hear it.
Click to expand...

Well, I'll give the short version here. A good friend of my dad's was cutting timber for Gilson's (? I think, I was a little kid and don't remember the name of the outfit.)
He was working in some pretty good sized timber near Arcata- around late 1980. Him and his partner were doublejacking Monday through Fri. Apparently Baron
decided to work a Saturday since the rigging crew was on the unit. The weekend went by and no one heard from him and he didn't show up for work on Monday where
he was meeting the partner. So they decided to walk his strip. I guess the rigging crew found his body under a large (80"+) Redwood along with his saw. His dog
was nearby, they said falling limbs had gotten him. OSHA sent an investigator out and of course they shut the job down for three days. They looked at it from all
the angles and no one could ever really figure out what had happened. It was a real mystery and Baron had been cutting quite a while (since around '64) and was
very experienced, especially on the California coast. He'd worked a lot of steep ground and was as tough as a box of rusty nails. We had the service in Brookings.
I wish I had more details but as a kid, I was on a "need to know" basis.
 
Thanks. When I was a kid I lost a couple of relatives in the woods. Nobody ever talked to us much about what happened. It's just the way things were then.

As I got older and worked in the woods I heard the stories. They were usually presented as object lessons.
 
Yeah it was pretty tough to get people back then to open up about accidents, injuries, and fatalities in the woods.
I do remember a lot of resentment toward OSHA and the state labor bureaus. Loggers and forestry contractors
were rabidly against regulating the woods up here.
 
Life is weird that way. There's probably not more than a handful professions where a person has to be more conscious of their surroundings, and the hazards they represent, than timber falling. Still, somehow, folks get killed in spite of all the best precautions and training. Meanwhile, on the highways, yupsters buzz obliviously around in 5-ton SUV's and somehow escape gruesome death day after day. It just doesn't make sense.
 
Very good story Slow p. J.J glad you shared that one sad one for sure sorry to hear about it. Working for county roads I get into some real hazard trees, some there is not really a safe way to cut em. I do my best and size em up and then some. A sad story was in 05-or 06 not sure, but one of our roads a guy was driving his van with his 3 dogs, traveling about 45 mph in a storm and a huge redwood fell and centered his van killed them all. I am very glad I missed that call out wouldn't have wanted to see it.
 

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