Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Neil from Beechwood Tree Care. Unfortunately, a tree has failed and landed on one of our customer’s houses.
Yesterday afternoon there were some strong winds and this triple stemmed ash, there’s one stem still standing, two of the stems failed and landed onto our customer’s house. They’ve not long moved in, and this is a neighbour’s tree that hadn’t been inspected and had some issues. And you can see that it’s caused some considerable damage and notable upset.
Let’s have a little look and see why this happened and how it could be prevented. Actually, quite a sizeable tree on the boundary, but clearly on the neighbour’s side. And when we go in and look here, where the stems are fallen down, they’ve split apart. And this is mycelium from fungal attack.
And you can see the good wood here, and you can see the wood that’s starting to be compromised. And as we go down into the stem we can see that there was actually an old attack from fungus that’s caused a significant cavity in there. Those holes in there are insect damage, so we know that’s been compromised and decayed wood for a long time.
We can see this reaction growth that’s swelling on the tree here, which has a different bark to the normal ash bark, which means this is growing faster because it’s smoother. And that the reason it’s growing faster because this was defect behind it and the tree was trying to put on wood to deal with it.
We go over to the other side, we can see fungal brackets on the bits that failed here. We can see fungal brackets inside here indicating that the fungi was trying to spore, which often is saying it’s running out of a food source. And when we look on the far side, we can see big open cavities and we can see a big fungal bracket from a derma.
And this is classic signs that there’s something wrong inside this tree, which has led to this really big catastrophic failure. When you look here at the failure point, you can see all of this wood is compromised. All of this wood is decayed and wet. I can pick away at it. You can’t do that in good wood.
And you can see inside where there would’ve been another cavity. Here you can see fungal brackets inside of there. You can see up in the bit that failed, how old that kind of hollowing is there. You can see insect damage in it in here. This is a bit of the wood that I’ve just picked out, so that would be where the cavity was.
That’s insect damage. This is the wood that’s been decayed by the fungi. Unfortunately, this was a very predictable failure and this tree, if properly inspected, it would’ve highlighted this and would’ve saved this really big failure that came down here. Look, and you can see where it’s gone up and struck that building.
So simple case of have your trees inspected and you can prevent all this and all this cost as well.
I hope that video is informative. What we find is that 99% of tree failures could be predicted. They often fail in heavy weather, in big storms or, when it’s really, really wet. But the actual potential to fail can be easily spotted before.
There are the other occasions where a tree just fails. There’s nothing you can do about it. But generally we can spot those signs, so it would. If anything, from that video, it is a lesson, is have your trees inspected, um, and encouraging neighbors to do so as well. Um, luckily nobody was hurt.
There was some significant damage. A branch came through the roof of that property into a child’s bedroom. It wouldn’t have hurt the child if it had happened when the child was there and the child wasn’t there at the time. But it’s a scary thing so get those trees inspected by us. If you need us to, we quite happily come out and look at your trees if you’re a customer of ours for absolutely free of charge.
And if you’ve got tree on your neighbour’s property, really encourage them to have them looked at. And then we can be proactive rather than reactive and avoid all of that drama and all of those associated costs and stress. So, take care. I’ll see you on the next video.
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