Situational awareness, or the lack thereof, can rear up and get you with surprising speed and efficiency. This is why the old timers taught us to look after everybody else and trust no one if it could be possibly avoided. I can give three examples of the fruits of not paying enough attention.
During my first week on the job as a prospective choker setter (circa about 1973), we were cleaning up some sparse timber that had been left when the ground was first logged 15 years before... mostly leaners and snags that the Company didn't want to mess with at the time even though the ground wasn't too steep. We were getting ready to stop for lunch, and the Cat skinner decided to do a favor for the fellers and clean the poision oak out from around a large redwood stub that was next up- probably 8-10 feet on the butt and maybe 150 feet tall. One of the fallers (we had 3- two brothers in their 20's and their dad), had just felled a large Doug fir down the hill and was in the process of bucking it.
As we sat down to have lunch, the stub decided to fall over. It was a hot day and the wind wasn't blowing, but it just decided now was the time. Redwoods have a very shallow root system (rarely deeper than 6'), and no central tap root.... and I guess having the D8 rooting around it was enough to loosten it enough to let it go. The snag came down parallel with and just to the right of dead center on the fir, and the faller bucking it didn't hear it coming- fat chance since he was running a McCulloch with a Mac 101 Kart engine in it, and pitifully little in the way of a muffler. The crew lost all interest in lunch at that point, including the guy's dad who watched the whole thing unfold from about 50 yards away. We pushed the logs apart with the Cat and discovered the guy had gotten unbelievably lucky- if you can call a fractured skull and a shoulder blade broken in multiple places lucky.
Apparently, this limbless stub was moving so fast that the shock wave in front of it more or less blew him down into the space between the two trees. It also wasn't rotten, which would have splattered him along with it. All in all, he was back in the woods in a week- sitting on a stump to satisfy the State Comp folks, and in two weeks he was put to work as a Cat skinner (which he hated with a passion- but that's another story). Lesson to be learned: even though certain things aren't supposed to happen, they sometimes do and the effects can be just as bad. Situational awareness is your friend. By the way- the redwood broke where it hit him on the top of the head... and it was 78" at the break.
About a year later (and a fully qualified chocker setter by then... at least "I" thought so), we were waiting for the feller to drop a nice redwood. The layout was in, and we'd discussed getting a few logs skidded at the top end of it while he got to work falling the tree. The logs were about 2 winch lines worth from the landing, and we had to skid them across the layout about two humps from the far end. So... there we were, skidding logs across the other end of the lay while the cutter was doing his job. The first hump in the layout was rather high, so the faller couldn't see us from where he was- but the Cat skinner and faller had worked together for decades and pretty much knew the capabilities of each other and had their timing worked out. The Cat operator was a grumpy old cuss- a great operator but not very sociable- and I could always tell when he was mad about something because he would start taking it out on the Cat. So, there I was- about 2 in the afternoon, sitting on the hydraulic tank of the D7 and hanging on to part of the canopy- about half asleep while the operator went back at the last minute to replace the hump that he'd cut out in order to skid the logs through. About that time he slammed it into second reverse at full throttle and I thought "what's the old bastard mad about now?" and sort of half opened one eye. That was about the time the trunk hit about 5 feet to the right of the right hand track. It happened so fast that all I can remember was suddenly being in the shade, and visibility dropping to inches in the thick dust cloud while firewood-sized pieces of redwood limb whizzed and tumbled in all directions past my face. We both came away unscathed but wide awake. The faller said later that he was watching the tree fall, and about halfway to the ground he saw a "big, black cloud of diesel smoke at the other end of the layout, and that probably wasn't good". Lesson learned: sometimes the feller's faster than you give him credit for.
Example the third: The Big Company we gypo-ed for usually assigned one of the junior foresters to us to keep an eye on us. Ours was named "Joe" In his mid twenties, and just out of forester school, he would always show up wearing a freshly pressed hickory shirt, and always carrying a yellow plastic wedge in his back pocket. Everybody razzed him about this, having no saw and all, but what he lacked in experience he more than made up for in enthusiasm. One rule you could count on with the Company was that you could always tell who you were dealing with by the pickup they drove; at the top end of the food chain you had the Big Shots who drove Ford Couriers. A 3/4 ton 4x4 meant a bull buck or the equivalent. A two wheel drive F150 meant you were dealing with the bottom of the food chain. Joe drove an F150. Anyway, it was the Spring of the year and was still too wet to log, but not too wet to start getting a few trees on the ground. The ground was pretty steep, so they'd started down from the rocked truck road with a Cat and made a layout for a large redwood about 75 yards below, then wenched the Cat back out while putting in the humps, not bothering to extend the lay above the road because the top looked dead anyway. The fallers had the undercut in and were fueling their saw when Joe showed up, walking down the layout from the truck road. Joe didn't get the chance to see a big tree fall all that often, so he decided to hang around while they dropped it. They hit the lay straight up the middle... and in the process drove Joe's pickup about 18" into the truck road. The lesson to be learned: if you're Joe, don't let yourself be distracted. If you're a faller, never forget that Joe just might be dumb enough to park his pickup crossways of the layout where you can't see it.
Porosonik.
He jumped out of the way AFTER he heard the crash behind him. Luckily, nothing hit him (though at this point, I wanted to). Guy #2 and I just looked at each other and shook our heads. Surprisingly, guy #3 (I would estimate) is in his early 60s. I would think he should know better...
