Historic Pecan Failure

[Canyon Angler]

That's a beautiful old pecan, treeseer...gosh those pecans get a nice shape.

I'm curious about this lightning reduction system; I have a pecan that darn near got killed by lightning, and I'd like to install something to mitigate that danger. Does anyone know of any good references on this on the web?

Sorry for the tangent/hijack and thanks for any insights,

Jeff

 

[treeseer]

The lightning PROTECTION system protects. see www.ipclp.com re that. Mitigation/reduction of damage/repair is just a protocol of steps to take to help trees that have been struck already. See the sidebar, the gray box, at the end of the page 8 article here: http://www.tcia.org/PDFs/TCI_Mag_June_07.pdf

Just because all this is printed is no guarantee it will miraculously save your 80% brown tree. It's likely nothing can help an 80% brown tree be more than 20% of what it once was.

 

[Canyon Angler]

Thanks!

 

[treeseer]

well it's pruned; took me 4 hours to reduce the heavy side.pic 1 is the after shot. looks kinda good if i do say so meself!

Installing the lightning system hit a major snag--9 cables installed at one spot 85' up the trunk, pic 2. 6 of the cables were broken and NONE were even needed--all the forks were nice wide angles w no inclusion. The 3 remaining were installed on the limbs <6' from the stem, so in my view the cables helped cause the failures by the "karate effect". :censored:

I had to cut off the excess and bond the rest to the lps. Major hassle--climbing that 113' tree two extra times made for a 13.5 hour day, finishing by headlights, burned out car battery, much fun.


The worst part is pic 3--this fruiting body of inonotus dryadeus--note the droplets on the top, very definite id of a bad actor in the decay world. no decay visible from this fungus, but it's the invisible decay i wonder about...

regular monitoring is scheduled so we can check that rot and recommend whole tree support with a guy if needed.

 

[treeseer]

Yeah they all broke near the limbs, judging by the length of broken cables hanging down. And yes the metal was soft; much easier to cut with my Lennux hacksaw than the ehs, which is all i use too.

of course now that i have salvaged all that cable i'll be using it somewhere that ehs is not needed.

o and tanks for the resize on that big pic; the dialuppers feel your

The tree does have high vitality, but that Inonotus creeping toward the main fork is troubling. Just a couple weeks after i broke off the old conk trying to ID it, out popped that fresh conk, which has to be some kind of indication the fungus is active.umpkin2: