Lets share near misses.

actree

actree

It is getting rough wishing families peace and writing RIP too often.
Why don't we share near misses to help us all learn and recognize hazzards we may not always see.
Maybe it could save a awakenings post in the future. Turn a negitive into something possitive.
 
Sure, but I think you got what I was trying to say.
About 8 years ago, we were removing a stand of Choke Cherries and at the end of the day, I was bucking out the logs. The weather changed a bit and it had a heavy mist. I slipped on a log while bucking them out and put my 357 across my thigh. When I went to the ER, the first thing the Dr said was be thankful I was wearing my saw protection (chaps). I received 18 stitches. The chaps did their job and bound the chain, if it weren't for them I would have had a worse problem.
The chaps now hang in the shop for everyone to see.
 
OK you want the scary ones. The dumbest one for me in tree work was cutting a tree off a roof under tension without first relieving the tension properly. Whoosh past my head it went like I knew it would but made the mistake anyway. Dumb. First really huge storm damage experience. I'd done so many trees out of buildings during that time I got sloppy.
 
Great topic.

I think the more one pays attention, the more one realizes how common the near misses are in life. Least appreciated most common near misses daily include those strips of paint in the middle of the road that some how keep those tons of steel hurdling in opposite direction from making contact.

I see/have become aware of so many near misses, in turn I truely believe there is a "magic force" preventing accidents. I call her arbordite for tree work, some label the force an entity similarly known as an angel or spirit guide, but that line of thought is another tangent.

Be aware, near misses are lessons. You did not almost die because you were awesome or so good, you were given a warning of things to pay mind to. Be humble and thankful and you will ascend with powers of intuition a kind to a ninja or wizard.

Anyways..here's a good near miss. I'm cranking on a gcrs to stand up a chunk/limb of sugar, it's vertical but still attached. Climber finishes cutting it as I felt I should not stand there. Second after I moved my self away the piece released swung a bit into a crotch that captured the rope and allowed the rope to slide right off the wood. It truely was amazingly freak as the piece landed right were I was standing. I'd a been clobbered. Climber was in disbelief and took a while for him to understand what happened.

There are some amazing solo alpine/mountaineer climbers who claim to have intuition/psychic gypsy powers to know things like when there will be avalanches. I'm all for it.
 
Tip tied a large doglegged piece and cut it. Groundy failed to let it run because of a rope hockle and it spun. It missed my head by inches. I'll never forget the sound of it whipping past my face.

Lesson learned? Don't tip tie unless you NEED to and beware of the wood reaction on curved or doglegged pieces.
 
This one was the first near miss I witnessed in the industry, happened last year.

Our climber was blocking out a dead spruce spar and taking it in 10 foot sections. For the piece in question he placed a snap cut, hung his chainsaw on his belt, got settled in to his spurs, and gave the piece a mighty shove. Instead of tipping off the spar, the snap cut released, the butt of the log shot out, and the top end of the log missed his shoulder by inches as it passed him on the way down.

My lessons learned:

Dry spruce weighs less than green spruce.

I should have insisted on/he should have used a tag line.
 
Yesterday i was on the roof of a house with a 30" x 30' red oak log embedded in it. There was no way to get a choker around it because it was embedded so we choked it right at the soffit and I cut of about six feet to balance the piece and stood back.
When the crane lifted the main log, the roof collapsed and the 6' piece went through the roof. I dropped almost to the floor with it. Their were nails and shards everywhere but I was unscratched. the floor structure took some damage though when the piece struck end first.

My judgment of the roof stability was bad, I should have known better.

Moral: Step back further next time for the lift, or, in other words... Don't be stupid.
 
@blinky.....yikes. Glad you came out OK.
The other day, we had a limb rigged to be lowered butt end first to avoid striking a roof line. The line set on the tip was set to be lowered slower than the line on the cut end. Our groundie thought it would be best to loop the line over the limb to pull on a angle. This bound the saw and when he released the tension, the limb popped and jumped back. I now have a battle wound on my hemet. I was more focused on the cut and communicating with the other groundie and should have payed attention to both.
 
Here's one everybody can probably relate to! About a year ago I was spiking up a tree when I came to a large branch and I unclipped laynard threw it around branch clipped it started to move....then..wait a second..looked down..I had clipped onto the gate of my large caritool. Holy shite! That shook me up pretty good for a minute as my brain realized the near miss I barely avoided.

Lesson learned,always visually inspect after any change over. You should use all of your seneses. Must have been that sixth one that made me realize something wasn't right about that. Caritool is no longer there.

A month ago I was switching over and missed an eye on my distel. I swung out and seen one end hanging free. I was only 20ft or so but still scared the hell out of me.

Check, double check, then check again! Look listen and feel for all the normal and abnormal.

Most importantly pay attention to those SPIDEY SENSES!
 
I have no use for caritools. I use a paddle biner instead and lash it on with Zing-it. I've definitely clipped it before thinking it was my side D. Not good but way better than a plastic wiregate biner.
 
I guess cutting corners to achieve high production quotas was one of my more memorable mistakes.

I had been hired as a climbing subcontractor doing dead cedar removals on the Lake Arrowhead shoreline. Doing very strategic removals at high residential mansions that couldn't be simply felled. Using my Hobbs device to catch very fat spars as I blocked them down.

Fortunately for me I had just started wearing a professional cowboy bull riding vest to replace my thick leather vest, which had rotted apart from a decade of sweat and hard use. The bull riding vest was brand new, one of those three piece Velcro jobs so popular now on rodeo circuits.

It was getting late in the afternoon as I blocked down a fatty one day. Things were going smoothly until I realized that this particular tree was so fat that I couldn't tie my usual half hitch and lock it off with a timber hitch on my catch block, that my block rope was too short for a spar this fat.

I knew in my gut that I should call it quits that day and get a longer block rope and play it safe. But I figured just a single timber hitch would hold if I cut shorter sections. And it did for two more sections, and I only needed to catch just one more section to reach the ground. But that last catch was so fat that even a single timber hitch only left me enough tail to tuck my lock wraps one third around that section. I thought about it, then said to myself what the hell, I'm going to finish this dang tree today.

Well, as that last section caught, my half azz timber hitch came undone in a millisecond, whipped around that spar and around my chest so fast I was unsure what had happened other than not being able to breathe since all the air had been knocked out of me and I was in excruciating pain standing on my gaffs, waiting to breathe again.

All my rigging was on the ground with the section. A massive hole was in the clients pristine turf that had to be repaired. I was thanking god for pro bull riding vests, without which I'm quite certain I'd have had a neat series of broken ribs rather than the massive ugly bruises circumnavigating my ribs and back the next morning.

I took the next day off to purchase a 30 foot hank of 3/4 stable braid for my catch block, and considered myself one lucky fool!

Moral of the story? Trust your gut instincts and F high production when doing serious wood takedowns.

Jomoco
 
Just remebered this...

Last year during the April storms here in Knoxville we were called out for some storm damage at some high end condos. There was this one large red oak had to have been a couple inches over 4 ft in diameter (as the 660 with the four footer wouldn't make it all the way thru) had uprooted laying in the woodline. So me and my buddy Chris had the log truck, some ancient rope, and saws. The tree had uprooted down hill and we were cutting sections and dragging them with the boom. Kept snapping this old rope. So we get down to the last 6 foot or so and its on a little hill not to big but big enough where I spoke up,"there's no way my little a$$ is standing under that log with this massive rootball overtop of me and cutting it free with the 660."

No drawing straws..i ain't doing it..period.

So we took a piece of this rope that looked like an octopus where it had snapped so many times and we couldn't get the knots out and just kept tying it together and attached it to a massive root and anchored it to another tree.

Chris started to cut it free and at the last minute I seen it break free and Chris took off down the hill full speed half tripping over half throwing the 660. I watched in awe as the saw still running was chasing him now along with this massive rootball. He fell just as the 660 flipped bar first over his head missing him by milimeters. I yelled keep moving. Although there was no need to as he looked like a silver back guerrilla running with his arms. The rootball stopped where he first tripped and fell. If he hadnt kept moving he wouldn't be here today.

I remember that like it was yesterday..big surprise the rope holding the rootball snapped.
 
Very serious Isaiah, but the silver back gorilla comment had me in stitches. This cutting up of uprooted trees on the flats is bad enough but when a slope is added we must beware of the forces of gravity which can occur in seconds. Nice post.
 
Just noticed I mispelled gorilla..i did mean the animal not the unconventional warrior. Damn autocorrect.!

Swing it is funny now but man it was scary when it happened. All I was thinking was how I was gonna hop the curb and hope the log truck could lift the rootball off of him.
 
Last evening just as it was turning dark I was down by the dugout listening to the ducks, frogs and cows and there was a loud crash. On the other end of the dugout my favorite tree had been chewed through by a beaver and decided to come down at the rare time I was down there. No wind, no beaver at the time and I didn't even know there was a beaver around. I could of been standing by the tree in the dark without knowing it was chewed and it could of been my demise. Would of been pretty funny if that would of got me while I climb rotten dead trees every other day. Revenge of the wilderness, a bit of boreal reality.

And the beaver laid it right across the inflow like he meant to. Then he was nowhere to be found at first light. He's got skills, game on.
 
Game on....just don't use Bill Murrays method in CaddyShack. Kind of cool to be there when it went down. Beavers are some serious engineers. Bet you let out a wide eyed WTF!!!!
 
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