As you know I'm learning about a great deal about tree climbers and understanding their daily struggle here is a passage from one of the guys that came and worked for us in the last post.
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The other night there was a humongous thunderstorm that woke me up at around three in the morning. I had all my windows open in the bedroom and I could hear the rain pounding and the thunder was booming like there was a fireworks display going on right outside my house. The lightning was shooting down right above my neighborhood and through one of my windows I even saw the electrical transformer on a pole behind my house pop. My eyes were still adjusted to total darkness so the flash just about blinded me.
The next day, I could already see the tree service guys coming out to take care of the fallen branches and a couple of trees that had fallen over. The tree service crews come out with their chainsaws and trimmers, drag the logs over to a big wood chipper and throw them in. I think the power utilities have their own tree service division where they have to trim back trees from where they have grown into areas where there are power lines stretching across.
That's probably a big source of business and income for a tree service business. The power utilities recommend that people keep their trees a certain distance away from their power lines. If a tree is thirty feet tall, it has to be kept thirty feet away from any place there are power lines. Luckily for tree service businesses, the power utility will place power lines in an area regardless of the height of trees in the near vicinity and homeowners will plant trees that will later grow high enough that they can later need to be cut down or trimmed back. So there will always be a need to clear these trees away or cut them back from being a potential hazard.
That can be a hefty fee for a homeowner, having to pay for tree service because their oak has grown up into the lines and created a condition where the tree is either potentially threatening to fall on the power lines and take them out or preventing the utility guys from being able to access the power lines or a pole because the tree is in the way. The best way to deal with this problem is to plan ahead and only plant trees in a way that they would never create this hazardous condition and never need the tree service in the first place. A lot of homeowners can't do this because the large trees are already on the property when they purchase the home and they kind of just hope that they will never need any tree service on account of the power lines.
Another thing I wonder about is the safety precautions the tree service employees have to take when working around power lines. When you're up in a tree working, you don't want to come into contact with any power lines for your own safety. But the tree service guys would also have to pay attention and make sure that they're not going to cut down anything that's going to fall onto a pole or a transformer or a power line and potentially cause thousands of dollars in damages. Tree service is a good business to be in when you're the owner operator but I doubt the employees take home enough to be able to throw five or even ten thousand dollars to the utility because they caused some kind of problem while they were working."
What a great adventurous roller coaster right? What's cool about tree service is that every day is different!"