OCT-A-4

ERNIE SHIFFLETT’S TREE SERVICE AND A SKY CRANE

BRING DOWN TWO MASSIVE DERWOOD RESIDENTS

OF TWO AND THREE CENTURIES’ DURATION,

WITH A GUATEMALAN REFUGEE CREW

October 2, 2003

It was an amazing spectacle. To begin with, remember we are dealing with a massive oak tree, the biggest in all my woods, with over three hundred years’ history as the lordly monarch of the Derwood woods. This means it was here when George Washington was wandering around surveying the area with his chain and sextant—in essence doing the kinds of record keeping that I now do with a GPS! Before this was a nation, and was a colony with land grants from Queen Anne, this tree was already here and shedding acorns around for the squirrels—about two hundred generations back in time from the squirrels that are playing around Derwood now—to bury to produce quite a few of the white oak offspring mixed in with what at that time two hundred years before the Great Blight of the American Chestnut, were tulip poplars (Tupelo) and pines with an occasional chestnut, now represented only as very long-decaying logs under the tire swing. This tree is huge.

It was rocked off its roots by the storm with a tilt that had it in free fall until it was caught up on the adjacent Tulip Poplar, itself over a hundred feet tall, and about two hundred years old. It tilted the poplar. If the poplar had not been her, the oak would have fallen and bisected the new house built on the corner of Leopold Terrace, what had formerly been the estate of the Persian oil magnate, Hakim, who went bust, and his property was bulldozed, the woods clear cut, the hills recontoured, and the maximum lot development had been platted out there now almost a decade back.

The other tree is a large white oak, to protect which we had the dead oak as tall as it was removed in July. This one was adjacent to the back door and the kitchen, and stood close to where the “Breakfast Room” was designed, and the architectural plans were made to accommodate the design of this breakfast room with its skylights and its doors. During the storm, this magnificent tree, as close to the house as it was, whipped back and forth with its full “sail area” of it s fully-leafed canopy, and it shattered thirty feet up, with the entire crown sailing through the air in the direction opposite the house!

In landing and shattering the heavy limbs, it pulverized the brick fence, and the Weber Grille, the boat trailer, the stoop and the footings of the breakfast room’s foundations, already in place with re-rod and the other parts of the plans now covered over in very heavy tree debris.

Behind the house, the construction crew had worried that the Air Conditioner would get damaged by the building of the basement and garage extensions, so they had removed it—it was new three years ago—and placed it up on the terrace next to the hammock---precisely into the path of the falling trees that came down with a bunch mowed down together from the steep hillside, falling uphill, reaching the shed, the hammock, and dead center pummeling the canoe and air conditioner. The Construction Crew had to get their equipment out of the back of the house and deliver the heavy brick and blocks, so they had immediately got working with their own chain saws on the obstructions and cut it back to allow trucks to pass.

Not counted originally, were another five trees that had come down in the storm, one covering the area of the garden, and several more on the back hillside, looking, as Ed Lubens had said, “Like a micro-burst of a tornado” had cut a swath through the woods. He was right. Now, when I had Ernie Shifflett and his partner Gary look it over, his daughter had reported Ernie’s only assessment: “Boy, what a mess!” They gave me the bad news together: “This is a very big job, and will require a lot of work.” They said they could get the two big trees out first—the one next to the house that had covered the Breakfast Room addition and get that work back on schedule, and the huge oak at the drive, and then come back later to cleanup the downfalls in the woods in general. They did not mention cost, but said it would be many times what the original cutting of the dead trees in July to prevent any problem with the house after they were up. That, I was reminded, was over seven thousand dollars in cash, so this project would be many times bigger.

Ernie said he would get his crane operator over first thing in the morning and first take out the breakfast room downfall and then take out the Tricentennial Oak. That was a big job, but it would be over in a few hours.

RIDING THE WIND,

BUCKING A CHAIN SAW,

SUSPENDED OVER A HUNDRED FEET UP,

WITH TONS OF FALLING TIMBER

DROPPING WITH PRECISION BY A SKY CRANE

I had gone to work before dawn on Thursday, with Gary holding my cell phone number. He said he would call me when something interesting would be happening with the crane operation. The crane is huge. It needs a stable base, and the expert crane operator (very efficient, but not at all cheap) is complemented by a crew of about a half dozen Guatemalans, most from the village of San Marcos, a couple from the capital and one Hondureno make up the “climbers.” I had got most of my letter sent and emails checked when I got the call—the Breakfast Room tree was already only a flat stump level with the ground, and a thirty foot section of the trunk would be picked up by the lumber man who would probably turn it into hardwood flooring, the kind, ironically, I would be buying in finished form as my heavy timber would be carted off to reduce the fees for the dumping of the other tree refuse.

I watched the whole process of the Big Oak coming down. Ishmael, from San Marcos—who was surprised I knew his language and his home town, put on a belt and climbing spikes. The belt was hooked to the sky crane’s hook. He had a chain saw dangling from the belt, and a rope with which his colleagues could pull him laterally as the crane raised and lowered him. Up he went, pulling the rope to start the roaring chain saw. It clouded up and the wind picked up so he was swaying with the canopy moving. He lopped off several limbs, and then went to work, curiously, on the trunk of the big oak about twenty feet from the top. He had to free that up, and let it drop, which did not free the tree from its leverage, and I did not understand why he had done that. Only later, when he pointed to the power lines, and shoed me that the big tree itself had fallen six inches short of the power lines, which would have been severed by the extra twenty feet of trunk he had first cut off, did I see how he had called this shot.

I called on the cell phone as the roaring chain saw took off the last of the limbs of the tulip poplar, that held the big oak—and with an almost reluctant slow motion heavy drop, it fell to the driveway, digging a two foot crater as it landed.

Thus does a colossus fall. I will have to wait another hundred years for any other tree on the property to catch up to that one!

The crane hooked on a belt, that is so strong it can lift several tons, and then logs were dropped at the side of the driveway. Meanwhile the other Guatemalans went to work on the tree that had hit the canoe, and topped it all out, gathering the branches to be devoured later by the chipper.

Two very lucky breaks had occurred for Ernie Shifflett and Gary only a week before the storm. This may mean they can retire to a vacation on Hawaii after their sixteen hour days end sometime next month. First, they engaged the best crane operator in the whole area, and second they bought a big machine called the “Intimidator.” This is a chipper powered by a 120 hp diesel engine. It can devour tree trunks up to 26 inches across! Anything that goes in—or anyone—is unrecognizable pulp mulch in a very large truck. The chips are sold, not just as mulch, but actually as biomass for generation of steam for power. The huge yield of the chips requires a steady stream of trucks to carry it away. The tops of the tree that dropped at the Rubin’ yard was devoured as they were driving away the crane. They came to my house in the morning, and were gone before one o’clock on their way to the next big ticket job. And mine was certainly a big ticket. I gasped when I heard that a check would be appreciated for what I thought was the price of a full size SUV. But, I paid it, and the job is done, and now the high iron can come in for the Great Room and the Derwood remodeling project can get back to full speed—even though I had heard some disturbing news about Glenn Murrell the chief project manger about a spot on his lung which was CT scanned and would later be biopsied.

The “prophylactic” removal of the dead trees to prevent any potential damage to the house, may or may not have mattered. If they had fallen, they might have cut the house in two, even a house built by Lowell Bennett, a frame house inside a cement black house inside and all-brick house. On the other hand, it would have been unlikely that the dead trees would have fallen, since they would have stood like masts, sticks in the wind, while only the young healthy and fully leaved canopies of the big trees were whipped back and forth because of their massive sail area, not reefed in as it would have been later in the fall or winter. So, I lost the best and healthiest trees on an emergency basis with the Hurricane, and had culled out the dead trees as the potential threat to the new house. The good news---the fallen trees did not damage much of the house! The bad news—since the house was not damaged much, all of the very expensive tree removal is a purely personal luxury expense not covered by insurance, since I had just raised the policy to a high value to anticipate the new house’s enhanced value, but also raised the deductible, and there is a $500 limit to carting off the tree branches of those (only) which land on the structures insured—and that is not to include the woods, other trees, and specifically neighbors’ lawns!

I would not trade places with the fellow whose bringing over the crane is a $1500 per day upfront fee, nor would I want to be one of the Guatemalan “climbers” riding an uninsured catastrophe waiting to happen. They get $500 per day and deserve it. The other big capital investments would be like farming with an unknown yield except that in this case the purchase of the trucks and the Intimidator preceded the biggest –literal—“windfall” in the recorded history of the East Coast Tree Service business. So, I am the one who got caught with the tab in this Act of God—or an angry devil, blowing through a property already ripped up and gutted from the inside to be remodeled.

Timing is everything.

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