There is a difference between being safe and preventing accidents, and it is not a word game. Safety, in a lot of businesses, is paperwork. It is the folder, the induction, the sticker on the helmet. Accident prevention is the decision someone makes at eleven o'clock on a hot day when the job is nearly done and everyone wants to go home.
The paperwork does not catch the limb
You can have every document in order and still put a crew under a limb that should never have been cut from that position. The folder is a record of intent. It is not a control.
The controls are the things that happen before the saw starts. Walking the site. Naming out loud what is above you and what is below you. Agreeing where the piece is going before the cut goes in, and agreeing what happens if it does not go there.
Most of it is not the cutting
In this trade, the injuries that end careers are rarely the dramatic ones people picture. They are the ladder that shifted. The chip that came back out of the hopper. The limb that barber chaired because the tension in it was read wrong. All of them are the result of a small decision made a minute earlier.
The rule that has never let us down
If anyone on the crew is not sure, we stop. Not "we discuss it", not "we push on carefully". We stop, and we work it out on the ground. Nobody has ever been hurt because we took four minutes to talk about a cut.
That rule costs money on the day and it is the reason this family is four generations into a trade that regularly takes people out of it early.
Not sure about a tree on your place? Send a photo. There is no charge for an opinion. Anthony, TreeX
