Found any neat pics? Street tree failure diagnosis

OsAGe85

Just browsing and found some cool pics. I dont know where the storm damage was and no idea who the man is...but the tree looks awsome.

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Gotta love the smell 2 stroke and wood chips. Be smart, be safe.

OsAGe85

Check out this ol boy.

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Gotta love the smell 2 stroke and wood chips. Be smart, be safe.

Eric Frei

LOL, and we reckon we got it tough with chainsaws and spikes!

Good pics, the very first has a lot to talk about and for street planters to realize.

The red arrows show the weakest axis for windthrow, the green show the stronger.

The yellow show where roots have pretty much failed to go further due to hostile environment.

Now the thing to really wake you up is the likely axis for failure has the higher target value, either houses or cars!

Large tree planting in strips like this is not very wise, yet done a lot. Isolated trees most likely to fail. Remnant trees where roads and footpaths are cut are a sure fire recipe for failure down the track (or die back/death).

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Mike Poor

Wow! The ground must have been realy wet for those root plates to pull up like that! The Ol' boy looks like he's doing the best he can with what he's got! There's alot of people in my area that leave P.P.E. in the truck & some of them don't even tie off!

Eric Frei

Notice how flat and sheer the soil and roots are where it met concrete?

Not only is it the concrete but the compacted road base beneath. Then highly likely a soil layer beneath of harder or different profile, like shale or clay etc ... so the whole lump goes over. Like the tree's stability is similar to a mafioso in concrete boots.

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luckydave

Thats a great photo to prove my point to the local council. They think they know it all!

Eric Frei

What many people dont know is how roads are built and what actually happens "at back of Kerb".

Did you know that here beyond the back of kerb what you visually see they excavate further and deeper as there is drainage below kerbs.

Here's a cross section, I have circled in red where the road level is that you drive on, and you can see what goes on. Often the back of kerb is excavated 600mm to 1m deep, sometimes they run slot drains. The reason is that roads are permeable and if they get waterlogged the bitumin can break and the road sinks, so there's a bit of engineering going on under what you see.

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Apocalypsse

Councils arent the problem so much now. With my new job ive seen some crazy shit developers are planting. Euc's that grow to similiar sizes of red gums planted on nature strips barely a metre wide. All the estate the developers just pick a tree that will grow quick, they mostly pick Eucs that will grow retardedly big for an urban area and completely mess with houses.

glennak

Where and what have they planted?
We once line cleared a street in Altona Meadows where the urban land authority had planted Lemon Scented Gums under the powerlines. They were all straight trunks 3 or 4 meters through the wires. I suggested they bolt the cross arms to the trees and loose the posts or remove the trees. But we had to reduce 100mm + trunks to finger size branches. But this was about 25 years ago ( some of the trees are still there).

Apocalypsse

Im working up Whittlesea way. The older estates mostly have maculata's, maybe 4-5 years old, about 3 stories tall. I forget the name of the ones they were planting in the new estates but the guys were saying they rival the size of the mature redgums in the area. A lot of people poison the trees, theres even an entire street starting a petition to have them removed and replaced with something more appropriate for the area, this was in Doreen.

glennak

Never heard of Doreen had to look it up, I thought that was still all farms up that way. Are there powerlines? If not what's the problem with malulata? As long as they picked seed from areas where malulata are stable trees they should grow with out extra water and help cover up the ugly urban sprawl. It's very common in some areas for street trees to have people problems. ~18 years ago we had ~200 trees a year being poisoned in North Altona and no one would do anything about it. Maybe worried resident troubles may affect promotion possiblities. One fella said he was going to poison it, poisoned it, then admitted to poisoning it and they still did nothing.

Apocalypsse

Once an estate is completed the paddock across the road starts construction. All utilities in the estates are underground for the most part now. Having these larger Euc's as street trees is overkill though, barely 5 years in and there have been lots of damage done by the trees. Falling branches, roots, etc. Youve seen how they build now, small nature strip, then most of the block is just a house.

glennak

Yea OK maybe they are not the best choice and if they have dropped limbs then they have not chosen god plants either. A woman did a Phd on maculata subspecies what is safe to grow and what is not.

Apocalypsse

Well looking at how they pick it the blame kinda does lay on both developers and council. Council gives a list of plants that are acceptable for street trees, developers pick the fastest growing thing and stick it in the ground by the thousands.

glennak

I have worked on this Red Gum twice in the past (last time about 4 years ago) because of it dropping branches. First time was a storm. Next time just chipped the branch and left torn stub. This time just a bit of wind and it broke the branch next to the last one that fell both above the fork. This branch took off another one on the way down. The only reason I could see was tall branch, most weight at the top and no lower branches for stability, and weak wood due to species.
There is not a lot of room for the trees HV and LV on one side and the building on the other that they don't want branches overhanging. It landed on the ground first so it didn't do much damage.

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Apocalypsse

About a week before I started a limb that size broke off a redgum which is on a medium strip between the main road and those little seperated side roads. It broke off in peak hour traffic and somehow managed to not hit anyone. From what ive been told pretty much every redgum in whittlesea we have to take care of (approx 1200), they have all lost major limbs.

dov

I cut down a Grevillea Robusta that was about a metre from the garage brick wall, the main house wall (also brick) and the front porch. Housing developers seem to love the bloody things. I've got to go back and cut out another one of the same property some time. Those things are like St Bernard puppies and grow about as fast!

Back to street trees, I strongly suspect that the 'v' shape being encouraged by line-clearers since the low-hanging cable came in are encouraging tree shapes that will cause many hassles in the future.

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Apocalypsse

Well most of the trees we clear from wires are Mallelucas, developers dont seem to care about the people who have to take care of the trees.

Up Plenty Rd you can see the new estates with redgums in them, some of them have like 4 units built right under them. You can see on the trees where major limbs have been ripped off during storms. Theres gonna be some pissed off people soon.

dov

I'm doing some sort of huge lemon scented gum at the moment. The thing has demolished the clothes line 6 times and the back of the house 3 times according to the tenants and next door neighbour. Bloody thing is covered with stubs where branches have fallen off.

The councils up your way seem crazy about preserving trees at any cost. Glad I'm working more in the South-east. Strangely enough, we have it seems very almost as many trees in people's yards and in the streets as in the loony green suburbs of the East and North-east, but almost no council by-laws protecting them. Makes you wonder what all the fuss is about, really.

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Apocalypsse

I wouldnt go as far as saying the council does anything to prevent removals, from what i've seen if a tree gets too big on the street it gets removed in certain areas.

Had an uplift order on these redgums the other week, rock up there and the tower is stuck into it. The block had units going up, they built it soo close redgum was all through the scaffolding, frame, some of the windows.

JBardey

Where do you get this from? experience, or do you have any data to support this?

I am more of the opinion that it is a change in the situation i.e increasing the exposure that increases the risk. Think how many very isolated parkland and hedgerow trees we get here in Britain living for hundreds of years through a multitude of storms to become veteran trees.

I am very interested in tree failures for my research, both in woodland and urban situations.

Eric Frei

This is what happens when people do not read in context and take little bits out with a twist.

I wrote:-

These are planted trees in isolated and restricted locations. Roots unable to provide sound anchorage in 360 degree circle. In that specific picture you can see how the concrete kerb and road restricted root growth in addition to soil cohesion due to the hard surfaces .... almost a "tear along dotted line" scenario. The trees are isolated in the sense of no other trees nearby to root graft with or shelter like a forest. This is not the same as field specimens or hedge rows that you have brought into the conversation.

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