Ouch.

[Mark Bolam]

I dont know where or when the clip was taken, or what happened to the climber.
My take is that the stem was at least partially hollow, and the impact of the rigged limb shattered the remaining holding wood.
It's a pretty sobering video whatever happened.
The 'climb higher and cut and chuck everything' is pure bullshit,
I've had 30' leaders break out on dead crack willows when tied in to something slightly stronger.
You aren't chucking them anywhere but DOWN!

[skyhuck]

7 minutes ago, Mark Bolam said:

The 'climb higher and cut and chuck everything' is pure bullshit,
I've had 30' leaders break out on dead crack willows when tied in to something slightly stronger.
You aren't chucking them anywhere but DOWN!

Obviously big boned boys like you should not be doing it Mark 

[Stephen Blair]

Poor guy!

Vertical speed line is my choice for dead elms if I have too with no pendulum swings.

More often than not it's tell the customer the lawns going to be bumpy!

 

[Mark Bolam]

Obviously big boned boys like you should not be doing it Mark [emoji16]

Busted!
[emoji23]

[Mick Dempsey]

I finally plucked up courage to watch that, very nasty. 

 

Agree with a lot of comments on here about what should/should not have been done.

 

All I can really think about is how he felt hurtling to the ground.

 

Poor bastard.

 

 

[MattyF]

Oh right. Due to the lack of fungal activity down under in the dryer areas the trees don't become a hazard as they do here when they die. Eucs are also an extremely dense wood, this combined with their large sizes and huge amounts of polyphenol compounds seem to create this concrete like structure. Spiking dead Eucs is a nightmare! I've done a fair few where we rigged massive sections on itself with no issues, bar the shite sloshing around my shorts obviously [emoji849]. I'd chog down sections that had been dead for 5 to 10 years with no decay in the main stem. Theres a dead forest out there called ghost forest or something like that, arborists from all over go climb those giants and they've been dead for a century.

In the uk I'd never climb something that's been dead for a decade let alone rig on itself.

Cool, Thanks for the explanation, I remember the one in that vid didn't look like concrete though as he's pulling bits off with his hands !

[Tom D]

Very scary video, he'd of been fine if he just bombed it out though. As for the climb high thing, I wouldn't fancy it, I once threw a line up a big dead elm and when I gave it a tug to test it I ripped out an 8" thick section. That could have been nasty. I have dismantled plenty of dead trees though. This was one of the biggest.... didn't rig it though..

 

[TIMON]

Looking again at that video. Even before the piece gets snatched, the main stem gets pushed backwards as the piece leaves the cut. I thought I heard the commentator say there were 4.5 wraps on the bollard?

[skyhuck]

1 hour ago, Tom D said:

Very scary video, he'd of been fine if he just bombed it out though. As for the climb high thing, I wouldn't fancy it, I once threw a line up a big dead elm and when I gave it a tug to test it I ripped out an 8" thick section. That could have been nasty. I have dismantled plenty of dead trees though. This was one of the biggest.... didn't rig it though..

 

If you look at the original vid the piece he removes is  huge, looks at least as thick as his waste where he cuts. Watch the way it partly goes and then stops, it looks pretty solid to me, there's a lot of smallish stuff still attached . I'd have gone up the limb and knocked off all the branches, then pieced it down on my way back.

[wicklamulla]

1 hour ago, TIMON said:

Looking again at that video. Even before the piece gets snatched, the main stem gets pushed backwards as the piece leaves the cut. I thought I heard the commentator say there were 4.5 wraps on the bollard?

yep I heard that too Timon,  4.5 wraps where 1.5 or 2 maximum would have sufficed in my opinion. As Huck says if he cudda shimmied up that stem and even reduced it by a third then rigged the remaining piece I reckon he would have been ok.