Renovation Techniques & Tools for Soil Decompaction
We’ve all seen them – victims of urban soil. Trees placed in cut, filled, mixed, contaminated and compacted soils, expected to live and thrive yet struggling merely to survive. What happens to them? More important, is there anything we can do? Roots perform many functions for the tree, including anchoring the tree, absorbing water and […]
Trenching as a Root-Graft Disruption Treatment for Oak Wilt
Most arborists are familiar with oak-wilt (Ceratocystis fagacearum) ) symptoms and management guidelines. Oak wilt is a fungal vascular disease that is spread through root grafts or by nitidulid beetles carrying fungal spores from an infected oak to an open wound on another oak. Oak wilt affects all oak species, but because oak wilt affects […]
Rigging and the Likelihood of Failure
Rigging is probably the most dangerous thing climbing arborists do. In addition to working aloft, which is dangerous in itself, rigging often involves cutting with a chain saw and, sometimes, large pieces of wood moving very quickly. When butt-hitching or blocking wood (which also is known as negative rigging), the anchor point of the rigging […]
Rigging Setup: What’s in Your Pre-Flight Site Plan?
This excerpt is a preview of TCIA’s soon-to-be-released, revised “Best Practices for Rigging in Arboriculture” manual. No two rigging jobs are exactly the same. Pre-planning of each rigging job is required, and constant re-evaluation on site must take place as the job progresses. Prevent your rigging operation from becoming an incident scene by pre-planning every […]
Aerial Friction in Top-Down Rigging Scenarios
Arborist technical rigging is often as simple as a rope, a branch union and a few trunk wraps, or it can grow to complex systems with multiple lines converging from multiple points to lower large and small tree parts. Of all the tools and techniques we apply, rigging setup and load management are often the […]