daltontrees

Sorry, I was just joining the Brexit bandwagon of blaming europe for imposing all that wishy-washy human rights stuff on everything. But Gove will repeal the TPO and Human Rights Acts so that nothing stands in the way of his scorched-earth policies. He probably had an unhappy childhood too, so swings will be banned.

I am with you entirely on this. And clearly drilling holes is wilful. But the test is wilful damage, and within that there must also be a test of whether the intention of the act was to damage the tree. There must also be some de minimus cut-off. I'm sure this has come up before a few times, and I recall concluding that it must fail to be enforceable as a strict liability offence because intent needs to be demonstrated. Then there's the whole issue of whether the damage is trivial and whether it would serve any public interest to pursue prosecution. And has the public amenity that the tree provides been reduced or lost as a result of the damage? If not, case dismissed in my mind. There's a lot of people who wouldn't realise that screwing things into trees damages them. Yesterday I pulled 6 catherine wheels out of the stem of a tree. That's damage. And nailing them on was a wilful act. In a few years the tree would have had to swallow the nails and plastic bits. But it wasn't wilful damage. Hence I think the concept of unintentional damage. If the intent was to put up a swing, it's a fair cop. But if the person that did it didn't intend to damage the tree in what they considered any material extent, then the damage was unintentional. Or at least, that's the defence that would have to be argued.

Don't forget the tree's human rights being abused!

All classic Arbtalk knee-jerk reaction. None of us have seen the tree, or the damage, or know the context, but of course the Council is wrong to err on the side of the law and investigate properly.

D'oh, I fell into the Arbtalk trap of not answering the OP's question. The best conciliatory action woud be to 'fess up to the Council' say that it was not clear that the holes would be considered damaging and offer to remove screws if the Council thinks there will be ongoing damage.

The crime is wilful damage. The damage may be twofold, first the initial holes and associated weakening of the tree's structure, second the possible decay and weaknesses developing over time. So if it was an innocent act, it's not wilful on the first count. But refusal to remove the screws once it has been pointed out that damage will ensue on the second count would I think be wilful. I'm not saying it will happen, but the Council could request removal of screws under threat of a refusal to do so being considered wilful damage. It's a matter of degree. The acid test is, would the Council have allowed it on application.

It looks pretty strong to me. I suppose you have to weigh up what or who would be harmed if it failed and whetrher you are trying to cover your legal duty of care to others or whether you are looking for a higher or lower level of asssurance for yourself as occupier. Live and dead loads can be reduced by pruning, and the probability of failure of a fork can in theory and in practice be reduced to negligible levels by pruning. There is a cost in monetary terms, in loss of amenity and in wounding the tre, but if the alternative is loss or gross disfigurement of the tree through a big CF failure, then it' worth considering.

Lonsdale addresses the generalities in Tree Hazard Assessment and Management s. 5.2.1.2 but in the end he says only that "A visual inspection by an experienced person can help to decide whether the area of bark-to-bark contact is geat enogh to pose a hazard". When doing QTRA assessments I have to put a range of probabilities of failure on compression forks regularly. Hard as this may seem, if you think in orders of magnitude of probability it is good enough, but it has taken years of call-outs to storm breakages and surveying thousands of trees that have obviously stood up to those same storms to get an idea of what is an acceptable fork and what is not. Mattheck and Breloer in The Body Language of Trees, your best chance of an overall biomechanical and numeric approach to assessing strength, do not even try to quantify strength. There are intersting comments about 'cupboard door failures' which are a reminder that the alignment of the bark inclusion in a fork relative to wind loads can be significant. Thus it is perhaps more likely that in southwesterly winds a north-south inclusion is more likely to fail than a northwedst-southeast inclusion. But only if the tree has not adapted to endemic south westerlies. That book also suggests that forks with leaning codominant stems are more likely to be weak by the jacking open of compression forks due to annual wood increments in the fork itself. I was up a beech today, c. 25m high with a deep pocket included fork near the base. While thinning the smaller (400mm dia at the base) crown at a height of about 15 metres, and anchored on it and the main substem, I witnessed to my great alarm the substem moving perhaps 300mm awy from and towards the main stem only under my body weight (c. 70kg). Yet it was protected from wind by an adjacent tree and the fork was almost perfectly sw-ne. The tree had to be 150 years old and had probably had this inclusion for 130 of those. In short, there's no rule. But I have a feeling that in the same position with similar dimensions a Norway Maple or a Cedar would have failed 50 years ago. On the same site there were 2 other beech I had climbed past huge compression fork tear wounds in a similar orientation, one was very exposed, the other had been exposed at maturity to fresh loads by the removal of adjacent trees. Yet no 'cupboard door' effect as the substems must have been enormous with so much dead weight that sudden failure led to instant vertical drop of the limbs with oddly minimal tearing beneath. Both trees were thinned by me, and I had little concern for the wound position being weak. n the contrary the reaction wood around the wounds was fabulous, if a little ramshorned.

My advice is DO NOT do them without PI cover, and therefore check with your broker what quals you need. Mine wanted to see sample reports and all my certificates. And if you can get cover, premia may to some extent be based on turnover. So factor that into your costs too.

Good luck pinning that answer down. Mature Cedar are notoriously self-destructive, even without inclusions. I'd say wind exposure is the key factor but there have got to be many factors. And probability of failure will increase with wind speed. Why do you specifically need a probability of failure? Do you mean literally 1 in X chance numerical probability?

Oh good, I thought, a thread about the likely effects on the tree business in UK. A few pages in it is degenreating into another pointless tit-for-tat about Brexit. Up to that point it was quite interesting to hear a spectrum of considered insights into the economics of firewood. Can you Brexit squabblers please not just go back to the Brexit thread and leave this one to be about firewood?

Not even vaguely within the outer orbit of being funny. Not even in the same solar system of funny. I've just spent a few days in Nothern Ireland, occasionally remembering too much about when kneecapping was a neanderthalic way of imagining that differences could be resolved. Wanna take your riduculous suggestion somewhere else than a website that is largely the public face of arboriculture? Or next best thing unequivically clarify that you didn't really mean what you said? Or generally just go away? Or think again about your interface with civilisation? Have you anything whatsoever to contributre to arboricuture or the tree business on this question?

Don't Prune Me?

Respect, Treeation!

Maybe? Definitely!

Jeezo, lucky that lot didn't go up. I got told off for answering my mobile phone in the petrol station shop a couple of months ago. Apparently it could ignite fumes. Or something.

Begging to differ slightly with Edward C. The notice was correctly given originally, and there is surely no need to re-notify or adjust the date of notification to accommodate the Council's misunderstanding of the legislation? As for cherries, it's a bit reckless to suggest on a public forum that they are exempt, emoticons might not be enough to save someone from getting into serious trouble for accepting the 'advice' from a knowledgeable person at face value. I hope the OP has figured out that it was a joke. There would of course be nowhere to hide for felling an ornamental cherry in a residential setting under exemption.

Petrol Retail | Safety Pass Alliance

There is no requirement for replanting in a CA if you have given notification under s.211. The legislation for TPOs and CAs is similar enough that it i common for Councils to use the same form for both, but the legislation is fundamentally different in a couple of respects. You are not asking for permission, you are telling the Council that you propose to remove trees. You need only wait, either for 6 weeks to pass or for a TPO to be served. So your notification is valid and the Council cannot deem it invalid because of the replanting intentions not being stated. If I were you I'd let the Council know that you consider that in a CA you are not required to say anything about replanting and that you consider the notiication has been given with effect at the original date. And leave it at that.

Fair enough, the head is long enough.

The third one I think is the soldier beetle Cantharis rustica.

No. 2 is the click beetle Agriotes lineatus.

Possibly, but if she had come a cropper while driving because of cyanide poisoning it wold make for a very interesting court case. Would the duty holder be expected to have foreseen the circumstances and therefore guarded against it? It would be right up there with the famous 'Wagon Mound' case.

I did say 'could have led to ...'. I have no sympathy for her unless she was told it was safe to take the stuff and drive with the windows shut for an hour. With or without poly bags.

Sorry to disagree but a n hour in a car with P. laurocerasus chip with a lot of leaf in it and no ventilation could have led to the breathing in of enough hydrogen cyanide to cause dizziness or even unconsciousness for the driver. But note, I said leaf. Being evergreen, P. l. wood will usually get chipped with leaf. Should you have foreseen its theft and the consequences? That's a different matter. Or did you give someone permission to take it?