lily70•28d ago

Vent: Rotted out oak nearly crushed my truck on a job in Austin

Last month I was doing a crown reduction on this big live oak in South Austin. Homeowner said it looked fine, just needed some pruning. I got up in the canopy and found a cavity the size of a basketball. All soft and punky inside. I called my foreman over and he agreed, we had to take the whole thing down. Took us two days with a crane rental that ate into our profit. The worst part was when we felled the trunk, it landed right where my truck was parked an hour earlier. I had moved it on a hunch. Anyone else had a job where a tree looked healthy but was completely rotten inside?

3 comments

3 Comments

pat_fisher2428d ago

Gonna be real with you, man, but that sounds like a lot of drama for a tree that was probably fine for years. Oak trees get cavities all the time, most of them don't just fall over. You moved the truck on a hunch, but it's not like the tree was gonna explode the second you parked there. Crane rental and two days of work for something that looked okay? That's a call I'd be second guessing. Just sayin', sometimes we make things bigger than they need to be.

susan_wright3428d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, totally agree with you. I did something similar last year with a big maple in my backyard. Had this weird crack forming and I swear I was convinced it was gonna come down on my shed any minute. Spent like a whole weekend and a few hundred bucks renting a wood chipper and taking it down piece by piece. Turns out the crack was just from old age and it was totally fine for another year. Sometimes you just get that gut feeling and it's hard to shake, even if it's not totally rational. Idk, better safe than sorry I guess, but yeah, it's easy to overthink these things.

adamthompson28d ago

Gonna be real with you, man, but that sounds like a lot of drama for a tree" - wait, hold up. Did you miss the part where they said the cavity was the size of a basketball?? That's not just some little hole, that's basically the whole core of the tree gone. I've seen what happens when you ignore those, and trust me, a basketball sized void in a 50 foot oak is a ticking time bomb. You're lucky if that tree doesn't split in half during a stiff breeze, let alone when you're up in it with a chainsaw. That crane rental thinking money saved was a minor miracle.