When you walk out from a safety lecture by Dr. John Ball, you definitely feel better informed, but it’s also likely you feel a little unnerved.

That’s because the professor shows slides one after another of the grim side of tree-work injuries. The broken or severed arm, the smashed cheek, the X-ray of multiple broken bones in a hand or foot, the bloody eyes, the worker lying in a hospital bed with bandages all over.

Sometimes you just want to say, “John, stop. I get it!” But he doesn’t stop. Ball is matter-of-fact in his presentations. He shows you another slide of someone hurt, and then, while that picture is on the screen, he explains what happened and how the tree worker found themselves in a place where they got hurt.

An improved safety culture
You would think that with all the graphic photos, people would stop coming, but it’s the opposite. His lectures fill every seat in the auditorium, and people are standing along the walls and in the back. The reason isn’t because, like NASCAR, some people go to watch the crashes. It’s because deep down, most tree workers know they need to better understand safety and see the consequences of the actions when someone makes a mistake. On different levels, everyone is being scared straight.

But the pictures are merely graphic reminders of incidents of bad decisions. What truly matters is the data Ball presents. The data shows that tree work is more hazardous than even experienced arborists often realize, and a reminder that tree workers must be constantly updating their knowledge and remain vigilant.

At a Glance

John Ball, Ph.D.

Name: John Ball, Ph.D.
Job title: Professor of forestry, extension forestry specialist and South Dakota Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources forest health specialist; campus arborist
Company/organization: South Dakota State University
City/state: Brookings, South Dakota
Years in industry: 48
Credentials: ISA BCMA, TCIA CTSP, TCIA Qualified Trainer, ANSI Safety Committee member, Advanced – National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians (A-NREMT)
Area(s) of impact: Safety, training, plant health care

I, for one, can credit his lectures to an improved safety culture at the company I formerly owned, Vermont Arborists. We didn’t always hold weekly tailgate safety meetings. The pressures from customers to get their jobs done, or bad weather putting us behind schedule, allowed for easy excuses to miss meetings several weeks in a row. But after listening to Ball talk, I felt like, “We just need to do this, all the time.” We still might have failed, but the missed meetings were fewer.

John Ball climbing at Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming. “”It has been interesting to see the difference in gear and techniques between rock climbing and tree climbing,” says Ball. Photo courtesy of Andy Petefish.

Background in education
Ball grew up in Michigan and has a bachelor of science degree in forest management, a master’s degree in forest health and a Ph.D. in forest entomology, all from Michigan Tech and Michigan State University. After college, he took jobs working at landscape companies and tree services in the Midwest and the east, then settled in South Dakota because his wife is from there. He was offered a job at South Dakota State University and has been there ever since. He could retire if he wanted, but says he stays on because, “I enjoy it, and the university keeps asking me to stay. There’s a good variety of field and classroom time, and we get to prune trees on campus.”

Ball has been giving lectures for TCIA since the mid-1990s. Back then he was mostly focused on plant health care, but was noticing something going on that wasn’t being recorded.

“While working at South Dakota State University, I started getting calls from former co-workers who knew someone who died doing tree work, yet in my profession very few college professors died doing their jobs,” he says. “I either knew tree workers who died, or a friend knew someone who died, or knew someone who spent serious time in a hospital. I started to wonder, ‘Does the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics have proper analysis of their statistics regarding tree work?’

“Turns out, they didn’t,” explains Ball, “as they focused on tree workers (called tree trimmers and pruners). But many allied professions – landscape services, for example – also prune and remove trees, and their incident data needs to be included.”

The government organization estimated that 40,000 people (tree trimmers and pruners) in the U.S. were doing tree work, but when Ball looked into it, he says, “Actually, there were about 220,000 people, when you include all workers who may be part of arboricultural operations regardless of job title. After analyzing the data more, we realized there were many ways people died or were seriously hurt doing tree work!”

By the early 2000s, at the encouragement of then-TCIA CEO Cynthia Mills, Ball changed his lecture focus to safety. “The point wasn’t about sensationalism, the point was that employers were saying, ‘I need my employees to see the graphic picture. It might straighten some of them up, and it might prevent complacency.’”

Ball began setting out in graphic detail what these mistakes look like, and his lectures have been packing them in ever since.

John Ball doing tree work on the South Dakota State University campus. Courtesy of Tanner Aikens.

Common causes of injury
Ever wonder what the main culprits are? Here’s a short list, according to Ball, that took him about 30 seconds to rattle off (bear in mind, this list was off-the-cuff and has no hard statistics behind it):

• Not having a retreat path when felling a tree.
• Not feeding from beside the chipper, including standing on infeed chute (do people really do this?).
• Not wearing a helmet.
• Not understanding approach distances when it comes to electricity.
• Not wearing a seat belt.
• Jumping.

“Don’t jump, just don’t do it,” says Ball. “Not from a truck bed, a log, a piece of machinery, anything. Soft-tissue injuries are common, meaning strains and sprains, and there would be fewer if people didn’t jump.”

Who bears the blame?
Still, people get hurt and the question becomes, who is to blame: the employee, the employer or a combination of the two?

“Recently, a guy tumbled out of a bucket truck,” says Ball. “There were two branches left to prune at the end of the day. He didn’t clip in again, and now he’ll never be an aerial-lift operator again. He blames himself for doing something stupid, but he was working for a company that tended to skirt the safety rules. He knew he worked in an environment where you could get away with it.”
Even though the worker blames himself, Ball says, his family blames the company.

When creating each talk, what do you look for when compiling the pictures?
“The pictures are not the focus of my presentations – it’s the data,” emphasizes Ball. “The purpose of any images is to illustrate the outcome of an incident. This can help tree workers understand what happens and – since first-aid skills are required – what they might have to be treating.”

Do you get involved in legal cases?
“There are always legal cases. I do not work on these, as my university appointment does not allow me to serve as an expert witness,” says Ball. “I did some of these in the past, and they are never pleasant.”

Has there been any innovative industry advancement that made you think, “This will make the industry safer”?
“The technology that separates the worker from the cutting – remote stump grinders and knuckle-boom-mounted grapple saws are two examples,” says Ball. “While technology can reduce present hazards, they sometimes introduce new ones.” For example, remote control allows stump-grinder operators to get further way from the action. But also it allows them to get out from behind the controls and move to where they can be injured or killed by the cutting wheel.

What do you hope your legacy will be?
“I hope I have been part of a movement to improve safety in our industry and, equally important, to address some of our approaches to aerial rescue,” says Ball. “I’d like to think my legacy would be that I helped to show what injuries were occurring to tree workers, and why. I think my impact includes the work on aerial rescue that showed v-fib (ventricular fibrillation) was not the most common need, so the four-minute rule was not needed and actually contributed to incidents. And the work I have done with EHAP.

Best show in town
If I could make one directive to all tree workers, it would be that everyone has to experience a John Ball lecture, whether in person or by video. Hopefully, if you skirt basic safety measures, you’ll be scared straight by his lecture. And if you already run a safe operation, perhaps you’ll learn something new that you can apply immediately in your operation.

Ball’s enthusiasm for safety resonates throughout our industry. There might not be statistics that attribute him to an overall improvement in safety, but there’s many an arborist who will say they are safer because they went to one of his talks.

Michael Roche, now retired, is the former owner of Vermont Arborists, an accredited, long-time TCIA member company based in Stowe, Vermont, now a SavATree company. He is still a Certified Arborist and a Certified Treecare Safety Professional (CTSP), and now lives in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire.