Short Term Contracts for TRAQ Arbs Out West

Basswood

Basswood

Carpal tunnel level member
Location
Long island
Curious if anyone has experience with a short term contract out west in areas affected by the fires doing tree risk assessment.

I’ll be getting my TRAQ (as long as all goes well) next week. We have likely a light winter of work ahead of us and my gears started turning on ways to stay busy. I’ve seen a handful of ads from companies out west looking for TRAQ arbs to come in and do assessments.

The pay and benefits claim to be decent according to ads. And shorter contracts seem to be readily available if I were to want to do it for just the winter.

Anyone have any experience with this?
 
Yes, went 2 years ago. They didnt have me doing actual tree risk assessment. PG&E were making decisions on what trees to remove, which IMO was BS, having certified arborist sign off on it. I walked after a couple of weeks. Not sure whats happening on other fires. Prepare for politics and BS. Just my experience. PM me if you want further discussion.
 
I’ve got quite a bit of experience being on the various tree projects in California. I’ve been going down there since early 2016 for at least 3 months a year in various roles. Currently I am working on the Caldor Fire in an area where 90+ percent of the canopy burned and we are likely to remove well over 30,000 trees. This is just trees that can strike the utility lines in a neighborhood of a few hundred houses (that also mostly burned). Next FEMA will come in and mark and remove all the trees that can strike house footprints and roads.

These projects have the potential to be very lucrative and in a lot of cases what we as arborists bring to the table there is highly valued. If you are going into the California projects with the idea of “saving trees” you have the wrong mindset. California is burning. The utility companies are trying to expand their ROWs and rightly so. Also, many trees that are on the questionable side of the spectrum of living or dying ARE GOING TO DIE. If you go into these projects with a TRAQ mindset of “is this tree a hazard right now”? That is the wrong question to ask. The question needs to be “will this tree survive”? Or, will retaining this tree help the utility or hinder them from getting and staying in compliance long term? If the answer is less than a 60% chance of fitting either of those parameters then put your emotions aside, mark it, move on, and mark the next one.

We should not try to bring “change” to these projects. These projects have plenty of “change”. It is called climate change. The effects of it are being felt very strongly here. The forest is changing. It is changing from a forest to something else. We very well could be witnessing the desertification of California and from my perspective it is truly something remarkable to be a witness of. Another thing that I think is very important to remember with these projects is what this area looked like historically. How many trees per acre did these landscapes used to have before we stopped the native peoples from burning annually? Maybe 50 trees per acre. Now? 500+ trees per acre. And we wonder why they are stressed? We wonder why the beetles kill them? And we wonder why the fires kill every tree instead of being like a passing rain and just part of an annual season? This is all to obvious to miss.

If you have the skills to pay the bills in any realm of arboriculture, there is more work in California than you can imagine. The only thing limiting you is your motivation to work on projects that at times feel like they are sucking the soul from your body. So much destruction that it is hard to witness. But then the adrenaline kicks in, and you just keep grinding away.
 
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If I come across as cynical please accept my apologies. I have seen too many towns burn. Too many cadaver dogs searching for bodies. Too many people picking through the ashes of their houses for anything that reminds them of everything they worked their entire life for. Searching for anything more than the pittance the insurance company will give them to replace what can never be replaced. We work 12+ hours a day, 6 days a week, and this will go on and on. And next year some of us will do it again.

If only people could learn from these places and start cutting trees down. 50-100 foot buffers around houses. Thin the forest. Not a commercial thin where they take the valuable trees but a real thin where you take the small trees and leave a few big trees. Take the forest closer to its historical numbers. And every winter they should be doing controlled burns. Even if California lost 2-5% of the houses in the areas they do controlled burns, they would be better off than the results and costs of these massive fires.
 
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RyanCafferky said:
If I come across as cynical please accept my apologies. I have seen too many towns burn. Too many cadaver dogs searching for bodies. Too many people picking through the ashes of their houses for anything that reminds them of everything they worked their entire life for. Searching for anything more than the pittance the insurance company will give them to replace what can never be replaced. We work 12+ hours a day, 6 days a week, and this will go on and on. And next year some of us will do it again.

If only people could learn from these places and start cutting trees down. 50-100 foot buffers around houses. Thin the forest. Not a commercial thin where they take the valuable trees but a real thin where you take the small trees and leave a few big trees. Take the forest closer to its historical numbers. And every winter they should be doing controlled burns. Even if California lost 2-5% of the houses in the areas they do controlled burns, they would be better off than the results and costs of these massive fires.
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I think a dose of cynicism is needed sometimes. I think it is especially needed when people start looking at things from a very one-sided perspective, e.g., “save the trees.” I am all for saving trees, it’s a great thing to do, but not at the expense of people, and not when it just plain does not make sense.

In my opinion, your thoughts here are pretty well spot on. Perhaps we should put you up in front of a television camera and maybe a few more people would listen.
 
Chainsaw wielding army’s needlessly killing millions of trees, while using massive amounts of fossil fuels in the process. Seems like the perfect answer to climate change and the desertification of the west. Will we ever learn?
 
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@RyanCafferky
Strange path to this current thread…

Recently did a job at a property landscaped in Japanese maples. Remarked to the HO I remember an old acquaintance who only does Japanese maples. HO requests his contact, but when I track him down he says he’s retired but willing to give me a thorough demonstration. In my interest I begin internet searching and come across a fella in Portland who is also a Japanese maple specialist, so I call him.
Turns out he just relocated to my town but also is no longer doing Japanese maples, because he’s some type of safety consultant for these right of way contracts.
He had good enough things to say about the work that I have been researching the different jobs for the past hr and how I ended up on Treebuzz for the first time in a few months
Edit
Ryan, I guess I tagged you because I agree with your earlier post… my thinking is I’d rather cut a wider right of way than have 200,000+ Acres burn
 
This is a mixed bag, yes there are massive dollars in Cali in response of PGE getting their asses handed to them a few years back.
BUT it’s exactly that, DOLLARS and liability.
This in some cases is more so a liability shuffle of independent sub contractors all the way down the chain. Some is very legit but sure you can make big dollars holding a clipboard but big taxes, and big liability shuffles down to the little guys playing a hand of poker for a new carbon rush.

I totally agree with control burns and proper forest management, real thinning, and the like.

It’s a complex problem and good intentions can be in the form of knee jerk reactions, short term profits, greenwashing, and ill intention (resource extraction vs climate change mitigation)
 
Never let a perfectly good crisis go to waste. Come on down the the CZU Complex in the Santa Cruz Mountains to see what the raping, pillaging and blundering of Mother Nature looks like. This shit would make a fucking Viking blush.

They assure us that a little more tree killing and burning of fossil fuels is all that is needed to protect us from the problems that we created by all our deforestation and burning of fossil fuels. Makes perfect fucking sense?
 
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