Marc On Fire

Shane’s Logging Accident

The Logging Accident

by Marc Hitson

Logging is a dangerous sport/trade, especially for timberfallers, so I wanted to share this Shane story. I worked with him on my first fire- he was an Idaho cowboy who had turned timberfaller.  One off season he went to Alaska to work in the woods in the big spruce up there on the coast Islands where it rains a lot. I heard from our boss later that winter that Shane had been in a horrible logging accident.


He was at the Fire Safety class the next year and I got the first hand story from Shane himself (and he gladly regaled me with it). First, I was surprised and happy to see him walking and at the class, as it had been reported that he might not be able to work on the leg again, but Shane successfully passed the one mile light pack test with the whole class rooting for him. He does have a lot of spirit, the young lad does.

The setting:

The Alaskan coastal islands get an absurd amount of rain and the trees, especially spruce, grow quite large and tall. They can be 15 feet in diameter and two to three hundred feet tall, and an average big tree (over 6 feet in diameter) would weigh around a million lbs.


The ground is steep and uneven making the ideal lay for the tree to avoid excessive breakage to be straight up the steep slope and this presents unusual safety issues for the workers. 

The trees grow faster than many other species in the area and form some unwanted swelling at the stump. The faller must manufacture some scaffolding from materials at hand in order to perform felling operations above the unwanted swelled stump area which he does mainly by conscripting smaller trees close by and using his chainsaw to cut short slabs approx. 1 foot by 4 feet by 2 inches thick. He then bores into the stump cutting a notch for the end of the slab to be inserted into forming a stepping board to stand on while performing his tree felling operations. Many such boards would be used on a tree this size.

Also, for safety reasons, the fallers work in pairs in order to have a buddy at hand in case of an injury while working this dangerous job. Of course it pays well to those brave souls willing to take the chances such as a somewhat wild Idaho cowboy in this case.

Well, as the story goes, one of Shane’s co-workers, Dave, had a close call while they were both falling timber up in Alaska on a helicopter logging show for Columbia Helicopters. Dave was falling a tree up the slope on a steep hill. In his mind he could see that the weights and lever forces involved were going to cause the tree to rock over a fulcrum up the hill, which was a rock outcropping, and the base of the tree was going to fly up in the air from the stump and then the force of gravity would pull the whole tree straight down the hill like a freight train. He could easily imagine this scenario in his minds eye.

As a faller, one’s survival depends on accurate assessments of extreme forces involving hundreds of tons of weight, the effect of gravity on the steep ground and properly devising a strategy of escape to safety. Flight speed is a very important element of the escape to safety.

To stay safe the faller does his best to establish where a safety zone might be and then devise a scheme of getting there in the three to 8 seconds the tree takes to fall. You can see that the survival skills of a logger include the implementing of real life engineering skills regarding what-if scenarios, and one’s accurate predictions of action/reaction. A lot of thought and reflection on previous experience goes into the planned execution of felling prior to the epic reactions which commence once the tree is released from the stump and the several hundred tons are committed to the forces of gravity.

Well, Dave’s what-if analysis turned out to be very accurate but he missed something. The one thing that can cause a slip up might be the least little factor, such as constant rain and mud causing one to slip during the escape route.

Perhaps he was getting pushed for production and failed to prepare adequate footing because he somehow overlooked the slippery situation in the mud and constant rain. As he attempted to make it to safety, Dave slipped and slid below the stump himself as the tree was falling and it popped off the stump and slid backwards directly towards him. Having made this mistake myself before, I can imagine the feeling of helplessness he must have felt watching it all unfold from the unsafe position of being underneath the falling/sliding tree. He had time to crab walk on all fours a step or two sideways which may have saved his life. A limb caught Dave’s clothes and pulled him down the hill at a high rate of speed as he bounced along the ground like a rag doll.

He was so traumatized by this event that he went to the bosses and quit immediately. The problem is, it takes awhile to quit in Alaska, as the boat ride out only happens on specified occasions, so the supervisors asked Shane to fall for Dave, and Dave would take the responsibility of 2nd faller and “bucker” so he could work. This arrangement was satisfactory to both men – Dave, who was done with falling, and Shane who liked to fall.

Thus the story begins. Shane was falling a 7′ diameter Spruce for Dave to “buck”, or cut into short logs that the helicopter could lift. Shane was using an 066 Stihl with a 54″ bar and chain to cut the big tree which must have weighed around 500 hundred tons (according to a spruce density calculator I found). There is so much rain in Alaska that the trees on the coast and the islands grow very fast and with misshapen stumps and roots and the big Spruce that Shane was cutting had roots flaring out so that he had to ‘springboard’ up to a height of around 6 to 10 feet to get to where the main trunk of the tree began and where the wood was suitable for the felling procedures. Shane had several of these springboards inserted so that he could walk around the back of the big Spruce while sawing several feet above the ground.

The trees that big can be around 300 feet tall. Shane is a good faller and has no trouble making the tree go where he wants it to go. When the undercut, or “directional face cut” was installed he began the final “back cut” to release the tree from the stump, taking care to leave the uncut strap of wood across the diameter of the stump which allows the faller to control the direction of the fall. As the tree begins to tip over, slowly at first, the faller must keep up with the sawing of stump wood to keep control and prevent unwanted splitting or “pulling of slivers”. Shane was worried that the tough spruce would pull up a root out of the ground which could dislodge the springboard he was standing on. As the tree started going faster and having properly cut up to the control strap, or “hinge.” Shane turned off his saw and set it up on the stump in the ever faster opening cut and concentrated on keeping his footing on the spring boards. The tree hit the ground with all its length and weight with a spectacular crash, taking out smaller trees and squashing down the underbrush. He took a moment to appreciate the majestic forces he had just witnessed. The vibrations dislodged a fallen tree upslope. Shane said he heard something and turned around to see the tree coming but it was already on him and pinned his leg to the stump high in the air.

He ended up hanging upside down by his pinned leg. He could just barely reach up and get his fingers on the stump and pull himself up so he was sitting on the stump of the Spruce tree, still pinned. By this time he was yelling for Dave who came running with his saw. Shane wanted Dave to cut him loose to get the tree off his leg. Dave didn’t want to do it as he was afraid the tree would slide on down the steep hillside and crush Shane once he cut it in half. Shane had to get himself under control, calm down and quit yelling and tell Dave how he wanted him to do it. Dave still had doubts. Shane yelled that he didn’t care, just do it, so Dave did and it worked.

Shane told me as he was relating the story that it wasn’t that he was correct in assessing it but just that he didn’t care at that point he wanted that tree off him. He checked his leg and realized it was pretty bad – his foot was backwards and hurt real bad. He pulled his foot around and it felt better. He started to take his boot off but Dave said, “No, it would be better to leave it on”.  He radioed the helicopter logging crew and the logging operations were immediately shut down while men and rescue helicopters were mobilized.

They had to pack Shane down to a clearing area where the helicopter would have access. It came in with a “long line” and a basket where he was loaded into the basket and tied in. When he was being loaded into the basket it was too small, and the helicopter was not equipped with a splint so the man on the ground loading him had to fold the leg back in an unnatural position and strap him in which did more damage. It hurt. They gave him morphine, and it still hurt. They gave him more until they were all out.

Shane was flown to the log landing area where they put him down in the basket, landed the helicopter, put him inside and flew to a hospital in Ketchikan. Shane spent the next 10 days in Ketchikan on pain drugs and he said it is mostly a blur – he doesn’t remember it much.

His leg became swollen and the circulation was bad and they were talking about amputation. Because of the swelling they could not put it in a cast or set the bone. Finally they decided to send him to Bend, Oregon where specialists performed operations to restore circulation. They could not set it for the first three months and Shane showed me two big scars on either side of his calf about 3” wide and a foot long. I observed that it looked like it probably took all the skin off his butt to patch that, and he said, “No”, they took it off his thigh and that hurt pretty bad in itself. He ended up with a titanium rod in his leg. They still were talking about amputation for awhile and it was touch and go but he was young and kept healing up.

That’s pretty much the story. He is now able to limp along and has been talking about going back to work. Whew! That story was an adrenalin rush just to write about and to picture! Loggers!

Moon Story

This morning at fire camp: I was eating breakfast – fried eggs, hash browns smothered in salsa, and chicken fried steak and gravy sprinkled generously with tobasco over everything washed down with chocolate milk. I ate it all. [Read more…]

About The Author

Since I am both a man of faith and a firefighter, and I love to write on both subjects, I have decided to do just that. MarcOnFire, my chosen site handle, can apply to both equally well and I like the idea. As I accumulate years and wisdom, I find myself pondering God even more than ever.  I get a lot of personal satisfaction from reflecting on all I have learned about life and trying to guess the big picture from Godly perspective.  Basically I have discovered that 1) God is Love,  2) People like to speak for God, and 3) the two are not equal but often become opposing concepts.  I am a religious warrior rebel on a mission of discovery. 

The rugged lifestyle of logger/firefighter is my proving ground for my religious discoveries as I find I am linked with my Heavenly Father in all I do.  I tie it all together a bit at a time as I observe and ponder.

 I think it will be fun to expound on religious subjects with pithy logger style logic.

 

 

Learning to Fall Timber

When I was just out of high school, I went to work in the woods with my Dad falling timber. We went to work for a tough old felling contractor Tom Williams, a friend of Dad’s who agreed to pay me the high wage of $75 per day and furnished an old clunky chainsaw for me to learn on.

Tom treated me with a lot of respect, which was heady stuff for a teenager, but maybe was because he had a lot of respect for Dad’s work. I spent a year and a half working with my Dad, being “broken in” or trained as a bucker, which is the job of cutting trees into lengths that can be hauled easily. This was a dangerous job because of the weight of the timber and the steep ground (up to and sometimes over 70% slopes). When you cut a log loose, you had to know what it was going to do, so that you were not in the way of where it was going. Dad was serious about teaching me safety, and so I worked for about 15 yrs without getting hurt, which was a pretty good record.

After we worked for Tom we went to work for a gyppo logger on Weyerhauser ground out of Sweet Home. A Gyppo was an independent logger who logged for many different companies, usually with older equipment. Sometimes the term was used by company men as an insult. I, however was proud to be independent and work hard for my pay. Dad had known this logger from before and we had gotten the cutting contract in part because of his reputation with this logger.

We were working in the biggest timber I ever worked in. The biggest tree we fell was over 9′ inside the bark. After I had finished cutting the tree into several 8′ sections and a few 16′ pieces, we were standing on the landing with the logger, and the logger said it looked like a sideways stack of silver dollar bills. The old loggers were full of sayings like that which sounded really cool to my teenage ears.

The ground was choppy and somewhat steep, full of ravines. It was a real challenge to get the valuable timber on the ground without breaking it up into toothpicks, but Dad was an artist at “saving” timber. I learned to buck logs on some pretty dangerous ground with the biggest timber I ever cut.

Dad and I drove from Oakridge to Vida via back roads and then over mountains on logging roads to the job near Sweet Home. It took over an hour and a half to get to work. We were on the saw cutting timber shortly after daybreak, so I was one sleepy kid during the ride. Dad, however liked to talk, so I learned to answer back while dozing, not really paying attention to what was being said. It seemed to keep Dad happy. Dad was one of those guys who demanded a response when he talked. We got along quite well while working together, in spite of being related. I think it was because he got more respect from the surly young kid, and I did good enough that he laid on some good, well meant praise. It was probably a relief to see I really wasn’t a total lazy slob kid who was a couch potatoe taking up permanent residence on his living room couch, as he had reason to suspect before I went to work. Actually I had a strategy of trying to get him to train me as he had discouraged me from going into the woods. I, however had done a little research into the job market, which was always somewhat of a depressed economy in the logging days it seemed, and I had discovered that there was a huge difference in mill pay and woods pay, so I really wanted to learn to fall timber.

 

 

A few years later, I was working for Tom Williams again in the old town of Wendling. I mean we were cutting second growth (or young) timber that couldn’t be over 70 yrs old, and right where the old mill town of Wendling had been, close to what is now Marcola. The trees averaged 22″ in diameter and over 100′ tall! I was single jacking, which meant I did both the felling and bucking by myself, and my partner, Bob Trantham was also single jacking a safe distance away, but near enough to hear my saw. If my saw was running, he assumed I was still alive. While working I came to a “snag” which is a dead tree. This one was a remnant of the previous generation of old growth timber and was over 4′ in diameter by about 40′ high, and totally rotten. It had to come down as it was a hazard to the loggers. OSHA (Oregon Safety beaurocracy) required all snags to be cut down. I put a big undercut in it, which is the notch you put in the tree to cause it to fall in the proper direction. You had to put great big undercuts in these stub snags because they didn’t have much lean to them. Then I back cut it to let it fall, but it just sat there. That is always a creepy feeling, because you have all these tons of weight just teetering there, not doing what you want it to. I put in a wedge, a high density wedge shape piece of plastic designed to “persuade” the balky tree in the way you want it to go. Well, the wood was so rotten, the wedge just got buried in the tree without forcing it over. My next option was to knock it over with another tree. This was definitely not an OSHA approved practice, but I had done it many times before without incident, so I went up the hill behind the snag, found an appropriate tree and fired away. It just brushed on by the slick, heavy snag without knocking it over. The same with the next and the next. I went up to the last tree I thought might possibly do it and began sawing on it. For some reason (I think it was God giving me a warning) I looked up to see the snag falling towards me.

It had come over backwards, falling opposite of where I wanted it to go, and looked like it was just a few feet above my head and coming fast. I started to lean away when it hit my left shoulder, tore off my shirt sleeve and knocked me flat. I couldn’t breathe, it had knocked my breath out, but I wasn’t hurt. I got up, inspected for damage, and all I had was this raw spot on my shoulder. That tree had hit me so hard it knocked me clear out of the way. I had a definite picture in my mind of me being like a delicate flower, easily crushed, having been just stepped on by life, and how fragile this life really is, so I said from my heart, “Thank you Lord!”. I heard back plainly, in my thoughts, “No problem, Son”. I believe God has a sense of humor.

Right then on that mountainside I was aware that I should have been dead, everything I was doing in my own ways had led to this, and I was alive only by God’s help. I told Him I was tired of being my own boss, I wanted to change and let Him rule my life. I call that moment in my life “sanctification” which term I picked up from old-time Pentecost and means that as a Christian you become more of God’s and less of your own. (If you’re not a Christian already, this is called Salvation.)

I promptly forgot my promise and slipped back into running things by my own intellect, but things were different between me and God after that and He reminded me of my promise later.

“His yoke is easy and His burden is light.” King James Bible, New Testament

 

Revenge of the Old Fallers

Two different faller boss styles

The old faller boss is ready to retire. He has a sense of humor that won’t quit. Some may frown on that, but he has that old guy get ‘er done mentality and the ability to do it.

For instance, my division leader ordered 4 sets of fallers, but there were no faller bosses, so we all sat around for a day. The next day they brought in Benhower, whom I call Ben Hur. My partner, Bennie calls him Boomhaur. He does not object to anything we do to the hapless feller, in fact he seems to appreciate it. In fact, I came up with the saying “who killed Bennie?” for a comedy line which Ben loved and also sparked a hilarious South Park routine from Russell. [Read more…]

Mother Nature Is Pissed Off

What is it with Mother Nature? Trouble is afoot. Floods, hurricanes, drought, El Nino, wild-fires, a tree-beetle epidemic, melting glaciers, tsunami, and I’m sure a volcano is about to blow…all symptoms of a distressed Mother Earth. What, you ask, could upset the fearsome Ma Nature like this, leading to such demonstrations of her terrible wrath? [Read more…]

Change Of Plans

Well, I got in late last night. We hiked in 1.5 miles to work on the west flank of the Warm Springs fire near Mt. Jefferson. We worked until 6 and then hiked back to the rigs, and then hauled tents and camping supplies up a trail several hundred yards and set up a spike camp just before dark. The wind was blowing strongly and the camp was in some trees. To get there we had to walk through a bunch of burning trees. [Read more…]