Ash failure from chips

[treeman82]

I got up this morning and it was raining... back to bed for me. Get up several hours later and have a voice message from a friend who I have been working for lately. Apparently a good size ash tree at his parents' house failed early this morning. It held up to high winds last week. Last night though it POURED. I believe he said that it came down around 3:00 / 4:00 this morning. The tree was an ash which was on the border of the woods line down in a hole. Roughly 24" DBH. Good size wound on the bottom of the tree. Doubt it was lightning, probably a good whack some years ago by a machine. Anyways... where this tree had been standing, my buddy had been dumping chips on top of the root system for YEARS. I believe the town made him clean the chips out of there about 2 years ago. From what I could tell from the uprooted stump, there was still a solid 2' of decomposing chips on top of the root system. The roots had completely rotted out on the back side of the lean. The tree fell on the house, but he was lucky. It busted up a few shingles on the roof, a couple of branches went into the fireplace, some branches went onto the roof, and the gutters got busted up a bit. Otherwise, he was ok.

 

[Matt Follett]

Ahhhh, perhaps anaerobic decay, caused by our attempt assist, the wound may have been the entry point for the decay and subsequent failure but the excess of chips hardly helped I'm sure
all to often seen in the real world, anything in excess they say...
I'll bet it smelled really good too? Got pics?

 

[Matt Follett]

Here's a large ash we removed due to root plate invasion, and subsequent decay

 

[Matt Follett]

Sorry about the pic size I thought I had reduced it, don't know how to now that it's there

 

[treeman82]

Give me a few days and I think I can come up with a picture or two