As I write this article, in our part of the world – the Mid-Atlantic states – we’re experiencing our first influx of storm work for the season. It’s fitting that I was requested to write an article on key hazards to look out for in storm work, almost as if we all willed this into being. Be that as it may, the topic is fresher in my mind than it otherwise might have been.

Don’t put yourself in a situation you shouldn’t be in. Take the time to assess the situation, and have a plan to mitigate risks appropriately.

Storm work can take on many shapes and sizes. Depending on where you are located, you may experience unique storms as opposed to where I operate out of. We’re notorious for hurricanes and microbursts, with a steady schedule of afternoon thunderstorms. It’s easy to get frustrated this time of year, knowing that storms are more common and are going to keep coming, but it’s an opportunity to help our community and put the essential aspect of tree work on display to the world.

With that said, I want to touch on some key things to be prepared for and to discuss with your people when storms inevitably hit your area.

Don’t rush
Rushing tends to lead to rash decisions that often lead to property damage, injury and/or fatality. We don’t spend every day in storm-work situations, and it’s incredibly easy to get excited by the work. Lots and lots of phone calls, scheduling snafus that need to be figured out with delicate client care, getting equipment on site to do the work and then, finally, executing the work itself.

With each storm I’ve worked, inevitably someone in the area I’m responding to gets hurt. Whether it be a rambunctious homeowner, a first responder, a city employee and/or an arborist, we all have a tendency to jump right in before fully assessing the situation. Last year, we had a fatality in our town involving a city employee who was trying to process a large oak that had failed at the base. He made the wrong cut on a critical pressure point and the tree rolled on top of him. It was awful, and I’m still gutted over it. But this story is, unfortunately, all too common in our world.

Right now, stop and ask yourself how often you arrive on site and immediately jump into the work. Do you talk about it as a team? Do you take the time to walk around the property together to identify hazards? Do you develop a game plan that everyone is on board with and can work together on? Do you have enough of what you need to include the right type of equipment?

In a lot of my travels, I find that these questions don’t get asked often enough, and we miss key hazards if we’re not looking for them.

Don’t rush in. We don’t spend every day in storm-work situations, and it’s incredibly easy to get excited by the work.

Electrical lines
Do not touch wires that are on the ground, especially if you do not know what they are. They hurt and kill us far more often than they should, but especially in storm situations when they are difficult to see.

The wires that carry the electricity – what we back at the office refer to as the spicy wires – have a single job in mind: to deliver that electricity to ground. How it goes about this process is an act of pure efficiency. Once it has a more direct route to ground, it will find it and pursue it with all its might. What that means for us when responding to tree work is that there is a high likelihood of tree parts making contact with electrical wires, potentially dragging those wires to the ground.

Let’s try to paint a mental picture as an example. Picture a large tree that was once standing tall, with a broad and beautiful crown, but with a root zone that has been undermined for years. It falls to the ground, hitting the corner of the house and destroying the brand-new wrought-iron fence installed last week. You and your crew arrive on site to remove the tree. What you don’t see initially is that the single-phase power line that was running across the backyard is no longer in the air, it’s on the ground beneath the once-vertical crown.

What do you suppose happens if you or one of the people on your crew immediately starts a chain saw and begins to cut into the tree? This leads to another key hazard during storm work.

Generators
It may have been simpler to keep this in with electrical lines, but I think it’s important to break this out separately, even though it’s related. In the event of a storm, especially larger storms, trees fall onto power lines, as highlighted in the previous section. Typically, that means the community has lost power. Many of us don’t like to have our power knocked out, and have invested in generators that are capable of providing electricity to power the house again. Whether it’s for vital health-related reasons or to keep their adult beverages cold, the house that didn’t have power after the storm has power once again, but it’s not coming from the same source.

We typically can hear this when getting out of the truck on site, the hum of generators ringing fresh in the air. It’s an important question to ask the client and their neighbors prior to beginning work, whether they have a generator powering their home. If there are downed power lines and the fuse box hasn’t been addressed to prevent the electricity from feeding back out of the house, the transformer that is on the pole or in the ground has the ability to take a lower voltage and step it back up to a higher voltage. So, if there are downed power lines, no matter whether they are designed to carry high or low amounts of voltage, they can become re-energized from neighboring properties.

I can’t stress this enough. If you see a wire on the ground or not connected where you know it should be, be careful and do not touch anything.

Take the time to walk around the property together to identify hazards and develop a game plan.

Cutting damaged trees
The trees we work with grow in such a way that they reach for available resources, such as light, space, wind, etc. They develop wood fiber to account for the environmental factors they are subjected to daily. But they don’t grow with the expectation that they will fail and fall to the ground. When trees and their parts fall to the ground, gravity is pulling on them in different ways than before. Also, these trees usually don’t fall in the most ideal places; if we’re honest, they often fall in the most inconvenient places. With that in mind, it’s important to think through every cut and be ready for the tree to respond in kind.

Take time to assess what the lay of the tree is. Identify the pressure points and where parts of the damaged tree are not touching the ground. In general, remove the parts that aren’t under pressure first. In many cases, we need to remove the parts that aren’t under pressure to fully see what is under pressure and game plan our next steps.

Think through every cut and be ready for the tree to respond in kind.

It also is possible, though, to cause a tree to move by removing the parts that aren’t under pressure. Physics is still at play here, and if we change the center of gravity and/or remove weight that is acting as a counterbalance for the situation, the tree can roll, pop, jump, etc. I had many close calls early in my career from being too trigger heavy and trying to clear out space in order to see. These days, I’ll try to alternate my cuts and remove debris to try to prepare for the counter-balance effect.

It’s difficult to fully explain all the intricacies that go into storm-work operations, but I’ll remind everyone again that it should be executed with intentionality and a plan, not by just running in and starting to cut to see how it goes.

When it comes to actually cutting, whenever possible, cut into sound wood as opposed to fractured wood. Sound wood not only will be more consistent for our chain saws, but also will be more akin to our day-to-day work. Fractured wood fibers have the tendency to move when we’re not wanting them to and to pinch chain saws. The wood is no longer sound and can’t be relied upon in the same way. Fractured wood also has the potential to shoot splintered fiber toward the person operating the saw or toward others who are in close proximity to the operation.

Make sure you have enough of the right type of equipment to do the job at hand in a safe manner. All photos courtesy of the author.

Suspended tree parts
In short, if you have a crane, use a crane. Cranes present their own unique capabilities and challenges to work with that require different skill sets, but as a whole, they are designed to make lifting far easier. If a crane isn’t in the picture, the points we’ve talked through up to here are all the more important.

When we are leaving the ground to process and land broken trees, we add the obvious hazard of being at height. That could look like being on the roof of a house or 100 feet up in a tree. The concepts stay the same no matter the height. We can’t escape the situation as easily as we can on the ground, because we are fixed in the spot we’re working in, so intentionality is all the more important.

First of all, don’t put yourself in a situation you shouldn’t be in. Let’s not add to the stats with more injuries and fatalities trying to get Cathy Client back to normal life. Take the time to assess the situation and have a plan to mitigate risks appropriately.

Second, there’s no such thing as too much rope. Rope is cheap in the grand scheme of things, but if for no other reason than it makes you more comfortable knowing the piece is secured by a rope. A comfortable arborist is a safe arborist.

Third, winch-based lowering devices are powerful tools in storm work, especially when a crane isn’t available. There are several available now, between a Good Rigging Control Device (GRCS), the Hobbs, Holdfast, etc. Even having a CMI Rope Jack or a small mechanical-advantage kit can be vital in relieving tension or adding lift into operation. While the price of these tools can be very different, the cost often can be justified by the income from storm work.

Conclusion
While the topics covered here are in no way an exhaustive list of the hazards in storm work, they are what I first cover with people, especially newer arborists, when we get into storms. This type of work is something every arborist will experience at some point in their career if they stay in the industry for a while.

The most important thing is to keep ourselves safe through intentionality, planning and slowing down a bit. I’d encourage you to take a few minutes before the chaos of the job sets in to enjoy the calm before the, well, storm. Take your time in assessing the hazards that are present. Find the power lines and ensure they aren’t tangled up in the mess. Find the pressure points and what’s holding up the tree. Cut into sound wood. Use cranes, ropes, portable winches – whatever – to help add lift and get the stretch out of ropes.

Ultimately, work together, keep your head on a swivel and stay patient. And thank you for helping your community get back to normal. Have a great and safe day.

Jeff Inman Jr., CTSP, is an ISA Certified Arborist, is ISA Tree Risk Assessment Qualified and is an ISA Tree Worker Climber Specialist. He is national safety director for Canopy Service Partners, a two-year TCIA corporate member company based in Chicago, Illinois. He previously was risk manager with Truetimber Arborists Inc., an accredited, 23-year TCIA member company based in Richmond, Virginia, now a Canopy Service Partners company, and is Truetimber Academy director.