Denham Springs Louisiana

Hurricane Gustau was born on August 26, 2008 and hit the Gulf coast on September 1st. Although it was only a catagory 2, it was huge and powerful and caused much tree damage in Louisiana. This was just one of the trees we cut and moved from property and buildings. We are trying to get a plan together to best remove the tree safely.

Here's what we were looking at. Much of the work we did with tree removal was from buildings. Most of these trees were Oak trees with an ocasional Walnut tree in the mix.

Here I am all dressed up in the chainsaw gear making short work of the tree on the storage shed. One thing stressed was the safety gear and safety proceedures. The orange chaps woren were special in that if the chain saw should hit the chaps the material in the chaps would instantly get caught up in the saw chain and stop the chain from moving. The helmut woren had face protection and ear protection attached to the helmut. It was a little hot under all the stuff, but we all drank lots of water and rested often.

Here's the whole crew taking one of our frequent breaks. The trailer you see us sitting on carried the Scat Trac that you saw me standing on the lift to saw the tree in the previous picture. We worked a total of 6 days cutting up trees with a 16 hour travel day on each end of the trip. We traded off drivers so the ride wasn't too bad. Then at the end I had another 6 hours to get back to Omaha. It made for a long day coming home.

This is one of the trees I had the task of cutting into firewood lengths. The saw I'm using has a 36 inch bar and as you can see it's just barely making it through the trunk of this tree. I learned a lot about cutting and using wedges. This was a Oak tree and took the better part of a couple hours to make about 10 cuts through the tree trunk. It wasn't all cutting time. The temperature was in the 90s and many breaks were taken.

This was our crowning glory for the trip. The tree was probably 100 feet high and we measured 60 inches across the base after the tree was down. It had been hit by lightning and blasted a 3 inch hole right down the core of the tree all the way into the ground. The home owner was afraid that the tree would fall on the house because of the weakened state.

Here you can see the hole that was blown down the trunk of the tree. The lightning, as you can see, has discolored the wood from dark near the hole to lighter farther away from the hole. A man named Link had a beasty old boom truck to lift the tree chunks off of buildings took a slice of this tree home to make a table out of it. I make the comment to him that the hole in the center would make a good place to put an umbrella. He laughed and said, "Naw, that hole is to throw the empty crawfish shells into the bucket under the table when eating crawfish. Ah huh, different place, different culture. So far I haven't had the delightful experience of eating crawfish.

Here's Link and his beasty old truck that he bought off the internet because he wanted to hual some big rocks. It just happened to have a boom on the truck. I sure was a huge help for us as with our tree removal.

Well, that's about it for this trip, but there's always another coming up.