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daltontrees

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Everything posted by daltontrees

  1. OK you can wait for the answers in a day or two.
  2. I thought someone would say this. But one of them actually is, but which one?
  3. Unless the developer got the Council to agree to maintain the trees too. All I was getting across was that in the past there have been agreements of this kind that no-one documented. The point about license and possession seems very apt. The Council might struggle to take title (ownership). Historically the law of land ownership in Scotland has been very different from England and the terminology is different, but I always understood that open, peacable and uninterrrupted possession could be used to turn defective title into clear title. That being so I don't see how the residents could take title. Even if they could it would proably have to be on a shared ownership basis which would cost thousands to change everyone's title deeds. I now recall trehre was a thread about this very subject about a year ago, a strip of developer's no-mans-land. There might be some answers there.
  4. I thought gravity ruled?! So what's the issue with this tree/ Apart from it looking like a freak with all that epicormic.
  5. I am glad someone read it! My general fear is that the subject is so poorly understood that even attempts to explain it will fail. I know people using existing systems are pleased and relieved that they only have to feed numbers in and look up the answer.
  6. Won't stop suckering though, might even encourage it?
  7. Yeah, know your stuff! Luck will get you throughyour exam but it won't teach you good habits and won't help you when you're working on sites. I would say test each other all the time, don't with till th exam before you try and list 10 safety features on a saw for the first time. And as someone has said, take your time. You will just worry the assessor if you are rushing around trying to look slick. Safety first. And second and third. Visor down always, never put hands in front of saw if it's running, even with chain brake on. Keep thumb wrapped around front handle. Always make a show of clearing escape route. Crouch, never kneel, to low cuts.
  8. I doubt that! I just thought it would be useful if anyone wants to look into it a bit more. Incidentally, it used to be thought a pathovar of Pseudomonas syringeae but has been elevated to its own species now. It is easy to see how it could be thought the same species, its action is generally the same as the closely related Bleeding Canker of Horse Chestnut (P. s pv. aesculi) and Bleeding Canker of Cherry (P. syringeae pv. morsprunorum).
  9. Might be as simple as the bacteria killing small areas of cambium, preventing those areas developing new xylem and therefore wood that year. Tree must compensate somehow by putting on extra wood elsewhere in the same plane.
  10. I was recently over in Basel (it has three names because it is in Germany/Switzerland and France) and I took a few photos in parks and the Botanic Gardens. I will put them up for people to identify if they want. In most or all cases I will already know (or think I know...) the name, so it's just for fon and practice. Mostly there will be a pic of the whole tree, then the bar then the foliage. I'll post the asnwers a couple of days later. Some are easy, some are intermediate and some super-hard, so give it your best shot.
  11. Full fancy name Pseudomonas savastonoi pathovar fraxini
  12. Up here it is and has been for decades quite common for developers to pay the Council a one-off sum to maintain open spaces forever. Of course eventually no-one can remember what happened but the maintenance continues becaue it's on a work schedule. Developer is long-gone, happy to wash hands of open spaces that may not have been properly conveyed to residents or Council. In my experience Council maintenance means nothing when it comes to legal liabilities for trees.
  13. Q1. Yes. Q2 No. I think it really is a straightforward as that. If, as is surprisingly often the case, the Council has been maintaining for years on the basis of some long-forgotten agreement or default arrangement or commuted sum paid to them. And just because the Council maintains grass doesn't mean they maintain trees. I had a case like this a year ago, we had a 10m cherry slung and on the winch ready to fell it and remove it, within an hour we had COuncil tree officer and 4 of the 5 management committee members there and the affected owner, just about fist-fighting. Turned out Council had management responsibility for grass but not the trees. It arose from a deal done with the estate developer 30 years ago. Council washed its hands of the tree responsibnility at the first sign of trouble. Chopping the tree down on the client's instruction sounds like a kindness. If the owner emerges, what recompense can he claim for removal of a dangerous tree? He could possibly prtove it was wrong to remove it but it would be a pyrrhic victory if the measure of damages was zero. Taking ownership of land just to deal with a dodgy tree seems like overkill. What about Highways Act powers? Or Local Govt Misc Provisions Act 76?
  14. In Scotland you have to have SEPA approval to use near water and have to have notified all potentially affected roiparian proprietors. Took 3 weeks for the last approval, SEPA (our EA) were not at all relaxed about it but OK when they knew we had herbicide ticket and were brushing on the Glyphosate. We had to restrict the amount on site in case of spillage. Drop any amount of that in the river and it causes devastation. Get it applied around the cambium within 10 minutes if final cut, within a day max it will have done the required damage . Clingfilm if required. Would paint will do too. Drilling is not as effective as targetting the cambium and applying very soon after felling. If you can't wait for EA approval leave the stump high and go back to it later with approval, do final cut and dose it.
  15. I am interested anyway if you get the hance to dig out the reference.
  16. Just read the article, what a load of old shirt! A mixture of nonsense, possible allusion to Meripilus perhaps and some dodgy lore about summer branch drop. Of course youy can't predict whether any tree will fall over, healthy trees fall over it is part of the spectrum of individual characteristics within a population. The runts of the litter fall over. But you can predict if sick ones will fall over prematurely. As someone has said, survey periodically and you will generally spot it before someone gets hurt. Don't get a gardener to do it, though.
  17. Ahh, I have been caught out using the old terminology. I was aware of a recent change but just used the familiar terms to illustrate the point about quantification of risk. Up here it has always been much simpler. Trees can be removed without permissin or notice if it is urgently necessary in the interest of safety. There has never been a need to categorise why it was dangerous. But I see now from the English Regs 2012 that you have a similar overrider, 'Urgently necessary to remove an immediate risk of serious harm'. I hate to admit it but it's even better and clearer than the Scottish wording. See how well it fits in with quantification of risk and the HSE guidance? You still have the 5 day rule, which we have never had.
  18. It's a big subject, I just mentioned the threshold set by the HSE. How anyone quantifies it (QTRA, THREATS, DIY-quantification, whatever) doesn't matter so much. Making a statement like you suggest which contains the terms 'high risk' and 'unacceptably high level of risk of failure' is loaded with subjective or unquantified and undefined terms. If I was making a general statement like that (as my reports tend to do) it is basically saying the same thing but less ambiguously such as 'following evidence gathered during recent inspection it can be concluded that the likelihood of failure, when combined with the frequency of presence of targets and the severity of harm/damage that could be caused the overall risk falls within the HSE's 'unacceptable' category'. You can probably tell from that that I am a quantifier and that I have read not only the QTRA stuff but the stuff that it is based on. You don't need QTRA training for that. So really I wold just be saying in this case (and it is hypothetical since I have only read a brief description and seen a photo of the tree) there's say someone present beneath the tree's fall zone 1/100th of the time, it will kill them outright if it lands on them and (the tricky bit) there is a 1/10 chance of it coming down before the next annual inspection, the risk is 1/100 x 1/1 x 1/10 = 1/1,000. The TO can try all he wants to shoot down the figures but he would have to be pursuing a prosecution for unlawful removal of a protected tree and would need to be ballsy to refute the logic behind the decision to fell if it is backed up be the evidence of lean. rootplate disturbance, possibly honey fungus, rapid dieback. All those elements affect only the 'chance of it coming down' element of the risk calculation. The other elements are much much clearer. Keeping it on-thread, I would have the tree down if the evidence backed up a risk assessment. I wouldn't be asking the TO, I'd be telling him. Hypothetically speaking.
  19. I think it's going to depend on who was responsible for checking if License was needed. Any contractor that blamed his employee would not only be a contemptible s**t but would get laughed out of court. If contractor says to client, 'I think you might need a felling license' and the client says 'stuff that, get them down' then it's the client's fault even if he has no fingerprints on the saws. The problem is as ever that if the client gets you in to advise on the logistics of clearing a site, how long it will take etc. and how much it will cost, and the contractor does this and is then appointed. The FC comes along with a fine. Client says 'I don't know anything about trees, this guy should have told me, he's the tree guy, give him the fine' and the contractor says 'it wasn't for me to check that the client was aware of felling licenses and the need for them, I'm just the cutter'. So who gets the fine? Personally I intend never to be in that position. I advise and check anyway regardless if it's my respoinsibility.

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