How many actual line clearance trimmers on site

Re: How many actual line clearance trimmers on sit

I like your style. I think that about hits that nail on the head!
icon14.gif
 
I WORK LINE CLEARANCE 6 DAYS A WEEK MOSTLY ROAD WORK WITH A 75FT ELEVATOR FORESTY BUCKET TOWING A 12INCH CHIPPER WITH ONE GROUNDGUY.ON THE ROAD ITS 34.5 LINES SOME POLES JUST HAVE TRANSMISSION MOST POLES HAVE THEM ALL TRANSMISSION DISTRUBUTION PRIMARY SECONDARY FIOS SINGLE AND CABLE ALL THOSE MAKE IT A PAIN IN TO GET THRU TO CLEAR THE TREES.HERE NJ 15FT RESIDENTAL WITH CUTTING ANY OVERHANGS NON RESIDENTAL IS 20FT CLEARANCE AND CUT ANY OVERHANGS ALSO ANY TREE NOT PLANTED WITHIN 15FT OF THE POLE COMES DOWN NO QUESTIONS.NO MATTER WHAT KIND TREE I GET MY CLEARANCE CUTTING BACK TO A PROPER LATERAL IF NOT IT GETS CUT BACK TO A MAIN STEM.WHEN NOT ON THE ROAD WE ARE IN THE WOODS ON THE BULK RIGHT OF WAYS WHICH MOST OF THE TIME HAVE A 500LINE 2 115LINE AND A SOMETIMES 34.5 COMES AND GOES. WE MOW UNDER BRUSH DROP TREES WHEN NEEDED FOR XTRA CLEARANCE AND PRUNE GROUND TO SKY ON THE REST THAT NEED IT.AND YES I WEAR SPIKES WHEN PRUNING IN THE WOODS.IF THERE ARE TREES ON SOMEONES PROPERTY THAT NEED TO BE PRUNED WE TRY NOT TO USE SPIKES.SO TO ANSWER UR QUESTION YES THEREARE SOME HARD CORE GUYS OUT HERE DOING IT ALL ME PERSONALLY I USE THE BUCKET SPIKES CLIMB WITH NO SPIKES MOW AND HAND CUT IN SWAMPS.
 
[ QUOTE ]
and smokey is one damn good line clearance trimmer.

[/ QUOTE ]
Second that. And thanks for reading my thoughts guys. It is a tough job, but it is a good job with a purpose. Customers may not always appreciate us being there, but trust me they do appreciate us being there every time they flip a switch or crank up the AC or turn on the microwave. You just have to find gratification in what you do for you.
 
I work for the big orange on an hourly crew we have a 70 ft altec and a vermeer chipper. We do mostly large danger trees and "makesafes" other tree contractors cant do. We do all after hour trouble calls and new construton work. There are alot of lazy crews in line clerance, just as there are alot of lazy worthless residental crews. I also own my own 55 ft bucket have a 10 disc chipper, skidsteer, dump truck and all nessecary gear, and can climb without spikes. I am fully insured and have a bacholers degree in plant science.
 
add another to the mix, i have been doin line clearance for seven years , started at asplundh six months ago and now laid off , i like mostly workin outside so this work is great but u dont always get to work with the best people, thats the crappy part, the lazy and annoying types seem to out number the funny good workers that we like to work with.
i just hope to find work around home soon, being couped up inside sucks!! be safe!!

scott
 
add one more...been doing it fow a while now. Use to take a lot of pride in my work when I first started, then I realized it is one of the most unappreciated jobs there is. You give more blood and sweat than any lineman or forester and get zero recognition and top it all of the customers generally dislike you. Makes a tough job even tougher. You better believe they would miss us if we were gone though. That forester wouldn't do much good with his spray paint if there wasn't anybody with a saw.
Work Safe
 
I came into the industry under hardcore line clearance trimmers that hopped to residential work. They were super hard working guys with a LOT of cool tricks up their sleeves. I also did my share of line clearance trimming and yea...it can be thankless. Most of the cats were pretty cool but I got sized up a lot. I disarmed all that with some well placed wise cracks and working circles around as many as I could. If I was on the ground those climbers rarely had to say a word. I stayed one step ahead of them always so I didn't have to put up with the way they conveyed orders with all that energy wasting down talk. Amazing how some cats will expell more effort shouting and bossing...rather than establishing solid non-verbals. Good stuff though. You guys will always have my respect bra.
 
Well....I dont know where to begin. Ive been doing predominately utility "vegetative" management for the last 14 yrs. My entire career has been mostly from a saddle. Ive worked on 240volt house drops up to 765kv trani lines.
Working in the utility line industry for so long begins to break you down. Every day a fight to make it to the end. Irate customers, angry bosses, unhappy foresters, unhappy bosses of the foresters, broken tools, NO tools, screwed up checks....NO checks, long hours getting to work, long hours getting home from work,new guys every week, new guys every day. The list goes on...and few men make it to the end of the career.
For 13 yrs I went to work, missing only a handful of days for doctor or dentist apts. I was dead set that my crew and I were going to obtain more mileage and cost less than any other crew out there. I bought all my own gear...mainly because the gear they supplied sucked. I was the first outta the vehical to work and i was always the last one in. I did every shitty little job they asked of me. I hauled brush, lopped brush, stacked brush,climbed spots the machines missed, climbed where the machines couldnt go, climbed spots other climbers missed or didnt want to do, threw swamps, over mountains,down ravines. I climbed year round, from -30 below to 110 and I never once complained about the working conditions.
He I am, 14 yrs later. Last year I agreed to take a GF spot with the stipulation that I still work with the guys.Ive worked with most of these guys for the last three years.They were all new to the industry. Most had never run a chainsaw but they had fire and were more than willing to learn. Right around the same time I came across this site called TREEBUZZ. I snooped around a little, saw some interesting things. I agreed with alot of the concepts being thrown around. They were ideas that SHOULD have been implimented in this industry years ago. But I also knew that most of these ideas would never fly in the utility industry. On this site I ran into a fella with years of experience in the actual proper care of trees. He knew about the physiology of the plants we were working on. He knew how to care for them, how to maintain them with minimal damage to them. He told me that if I was going to be imersed in this field, and I really cared about it, that I should do my part and educate myself as much as possible in the proper and proven ways of arboriculture. At first I thought....OVEREDUCATED IDIOT! As I got to know this guy I grew rather envious of his knowledge of trees. Here I was, 32 yrs old, had been trimming these things for over half my life and yet I knew so little about them. He convinced me to become certified. He said,"Once you learn it, they can never take it from you."
I got certified. I began doing things the right way. When i wasnt cutting I was reading, I couldnt get enough. I was constantly on my crew to go the extra mile to make proper cuts, appropriate cuts. I stripped my climb crew of their hooks and we began climbing spurless. It was a huge hassel at first. Everyone hated the idea, but before long we were getting better at it. NExt thing you know we were doing the same amount of work without the gaffs and it was a much cleaner looking more professional job.
All seemed to be going well. Everyone was happy.
Then ONE day...just one friggin day, I didnt make it to the job site because I had to go to the office. In the course of that 10 hours the forester and the joker that I answer to had come in and allowed the guys to wear spikes. When I returned on Tuesday several of the guys were in hooks. When I asked who gave em permission to wear them they told me the big boss and the forester. When I questioned them{forester and boss} they both gave me some bullshit about how its always been done. I told the guys that they look like amateur treetards. Some apologized and removed the spurs, a few others told me that if the forester and the big boss are ok with it, then theyre going to use them.
So....here I stand in the middle of battle over a problem i corrected a year ago. The group of spur happy shits have gained the favor of my superiors as well as the forester. This type of right here is exactly the reason that utility line trimmers get looked down upon. In the whole scheme of things we are highly skilled individuals. Many of us are master riggers, cutters,fellers,operators, but if we cant show some respect for the plants we are working on....the ones that allow us to receive a paycheck every week....then we are really nothin but a band of destructive, saw happy amateurs.
Speelyei hit it right on the head. People with no clue make the rules and if you dont follow THEIR rules there are many in line behine you to take the wheel.........and the majority of them are nothing more than "yes sir!" idiots.It all boils down to revenue. Whatever is cheapest and the most profitable gets the thumbs up
Im proud to say I am a utility line trimmer.......Im not proud of the utility line industry.
 
That's the most intense post I've seen in a LoNG time. I have a great deal of respect for you because you stuck around after it was clear that your superiors thought very little of the work you did to instill those (spurless) values in your crew. You single handedly influenced their climbing practices, took one less conductor off their bodies, educated them moreso than was expected of them or you, taught them to minimize their impact on the second most important natural resource on Earth, helped them think more creatively in the art of climbing while keeping up with what I know first hand can be a high production demand. THEN ...you stuck around after they disempowered you. You have much more restraint that me. They'd have to dismiss me after I politely made someone feel very uncomfortable. Hats off to you sir. Thank you for keeping us in electricity.
 
Just wondering oldschool....did you get the same number of trims when youi switched to spurless or how long did it take you.
I have been in the business for a while now and the utility we worked for just switched to a unit system, where we get paid by the tree. I would like to make the transition but really can't afford for my crew to lose any units per week. If I asked the utility and forester for "training" time they would laugh at me. They would expect it to be on our own time and guys don't work for free (with what they make I am suprised some of them work at all).
 
Old School, I took over my position 5 years ago and have been fighting the same fight as the forester. Crews that I inherited were sloppy and unprofessional and deserved the reputation that they were saddled with. It was not because they didn't care, it was because they didn't know or understand. I got push back from higher up to do what was done in the past just to get the job done and push back from the line clearing crews to do what they had always done in the past because that's what worked then so why should they change now.

I've learned alot in the last few years and I think that I've made a difference in quality while still getting the job done and can tell you as someone who tracks costs that doing the job correctly does not greatly effect production. In the short term until you get people on board, yes it does but in the long term and at the end of the day it will save your utility money and it's all about the money.

I can certainly appreciate your position and frustration.
My only thing that I can say to you besides keep up the fight is that, sometimes the popular decisison is not always right and the right decision is not always popular.
 
brushbull....we werent able to get the same volume of trees done spurless as we were with them but the numbers werent so far off that it astounding. we just had to be more organized and plan a bit better. the day had to roll smoother with everyone taking the initiative and a leadership role to try and make up for the lost time. Of all the things at our disposal that benefieted us the most, it was the ladder. Much of the work we do in the city is less than 60 feet. If a climber can make it to the first limb its very easy to work your way up from there. Limb isolation from teh ground is extremely difficult in city back yards next to the lines.....and a bit harry. we were holding our own!
the messed up part is that.....people who live in cities usually have very little property of their own. their yards consist of usually under an acre and its what they have to look at 365 days a year. some of these people only have 1 tree in their entire world that they can call their own and just because its next to a utility line it gets raped. Now dont get me wrong, I realize that they MUST be kept clear of the lines, but anything that can be done to preserve the integrity of that tree SHOULD be done.
I was actually kinda proud of myself and the guys once we got into a groove. Ive NEVER worked with a hookless utility crew...and neither had they.
I didnt lose yet...im a dick head when I need to be
 
not everybody at asplundh is a lazy trimmer! i steady trim 8 out of 10 hrs. a day. the other 2 hrs. are broke into 2 15 min. breaks, 1 30 min. lunch and the rest is prep. work. name calling everybody associated w/ a certain co. isn't right. if you are wondering about stub cutting, thats up to the energy co. and their quality inspector's (that's you). if you think that a crew in your district is laying down maybe you need to call in on them. speak your mind to the people that can make a difference, don't whine about it on the cmu. and as far as distance per week i have no idea we just do as much as we can, whether it's one span or three a day. i don't imagine any back line climbing crew can get more than three reg. spans per day. no spike climbing isn't pushed because of the turn over rate and the amount of time it takes to train a guy to climb well enough not to get himself killed. i've been spike free for sometime but it's because of personal aspirations. quality work is a personal choice. pride, professionalism and love of the job.
 
I do line clearance 5-6 days a week mostly out on the highlines (200-500kv) doing almost exclusively removals and storm set ups consisting of several removals. I also do residential work with a landscaper on the side. I've not known a day trimming power lines where we sat and did nothing that wasn't a storm standby day. Out of the 28 guys on the utility property I work for most have been there for 15+years and are some of the hardest working older guys I've ever met. The 3 best climbers on the property are over 60 and just keep on going day in day out. I guess I'm just lucky to work with such awesome guys with great work ethic on such a small property.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

New threads New posts

Kask Stihl NORTHEASTERN Arborists Wesspur TreeStuff.com Teufelberger Westminster X-Rigging Teufelberger
Back
Top Bottom