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December 11, 2004
Killer Trees
A local man was killed while cutting firewood.
Billy Head, 45, was cutting firewood at about 3:30 p.m. in a field near the New Prospect Church on Gann Ridge Road when the accident happened, said Doug Gay, the Benton County Sheriff's Office public information officer.
Head cut partially through a tree with a chain saw, and the tree split and began to fall. The bottom portion of the tree trunk swung upward and struck his head and threw him 12 feet, Gay said.
Cutting timber with a chainsaw is dangerous work. I had a great-uncle who died from a similar incident when in his 70's. I don't remember the exact details, but he had a tree split on him something like that, and it kicked back and basically pounded his head into the ground....repeatedly hitting him in the back of head so hard that it knocked all his teeth out.
Actually he survived that, but while in the hospital for an extended time recovering, he caught pneumonia and died.
Uncle Jack was a pretty tough old bird.
Posted by Rita at December 11, 2004 07:33 AM
Comments
That's why folks hire a service to cut trees, I guess. Can be dangerous.
Posted by: PSoTD at December 11, 2004 12:53 PM
It's dangerous even when you know what you're doing. Which is why tree trimming services cost so much.
Posted by: rita at December 13, 2004 07:42 AM
That's so sad and I had no idea it was quite that dangerous but then I've never known anyone who acutally goes out and cuts big trees.
Posted by: yayaempress at December 13, 2004 12:17 PM
The danger is also why most tree-cutting services generally work their way up the tree, taking off all the limbs, and then remove short chunks of the main trunk from the top down. They don't just fell the tree right off the bat any more.
Posted by: Keith at December 13, 2004 01:27 PM
Yep, that's less dangerous though you can still have a branch split & knock you right out of the cherry picker.
Another danger here is that people back in the day used to nail fences directly to trees, which would eventually grow over it. So you can be sawing along, and the saw will hit metal that's embedded in the tree....which can make the saw kick back on you.
Which is why I thought those stupid tree-huggers who were deliberately embedding metal into tree out in the Northwest should've been charged with attempted murder. Buncha dumb-asses could've killed someone.
Posted by: rita at December 13, 2004 01:36 PM
I've only been involved in felling a couple of trees, but in both cases we had guy ropes 45 degrees either side of the intended drop line. I'm not sure how much difference this would have made against a kickout, but we actually snapped the trunks by pulling the ropes after the back cut got close to the notch, so there was nobody standing by the tree when it came down.
Posted by: triticale at December 14, 2004 09:50 PM