Storm Stump and Root Plate Cleanup in Ashland City, TN

Wet Ground Tips a Tree, Thin Ridge Soil Snaps It

The failure mode changes with the elevation, and it changes who you should be calling first. Once alluvial silt is fully saturated it loses most of its shear strength, and a root system that would hold through an August thunderstorm lets go in a February gust at half that wind speed. Down on the flats the tree therefore leaves the ground more or less intact.

Up on the ridge streets the roots are wedged into seams in the limestone and cannot pull out, so the trunk gives way instead. What you are left with there is a standing stub twelve or fifteen feet up with a splintered top, and underneath it a stump that becomes completely ordinary the moment somebody with a saw brings that stub down to a workable height.

Those are two different jobs needing two different trades in a different order. A ridge snap needs a climber before it needs a grinder. A bottomland windthrow needs the plate settled before anything spins. Say which one you are looking at and we will tell you whether we are the first call or the second.

A Storm Stump Tells You About the Trees Still Standing

There is information in the wreck, and it is worth ten minutes before it all gets hauled off. Look at the broken face and the underside of the plate. A dark, wet, hollow centre with sound wood only in the outer few inches says the tree had been failing quietly for years and the wind merely finished it. A plate with roots on three sides and nothing on the fourth says the tree grew hard against a drive or a foundation and never had anchorage in that direction. Two stems meeting in a tight V with bark trapped down inside the join is included bark, which is the most common structural failure in box elder and silver maple in this town.

Why it matters: these trees were seldom planted alone. Three box elders along a back fence went in the same season, grew in the same wet ground and are the same age. If the middle one came out hollow, the other two are running on the same clock, and that is a decision better made now than after the next line of storms comes through.

We photograph what turns up in the cut and hand it over either way.

Storm Work Is Quoted by the Hour, Not by the Inch

A diameter chart assumes a clean sawn face, a known species and a stump sitting where it grew. Storm work breaks all three of those assumptions at once. The wood is torn rather than cut, so the fibre is long and stringy and the wheel never gets a clean bite. The root mass is packed with soil, and on the ridge lots with chert and creek rock as well, which is harder on carbide than any wood in the county. And the piece is very often lying somewhere it did not grow.

So the price comes as hours or as a figure for the piece, with an honest estimate of the hours up front. The larger half of that time is usually not grinding at all. It is getting the wreck into a position where grinding is possible and getting soil out of the roots before carbide meets any of it.

If somebody with an excavator has already dropped the plate back and knocked it clean, say so on the phone. That is real money off the number and it should be off yours, not kept by us.

Burning the Pile Is Allowed Here, With a Permit

The city code treats open burning of natural untreated wood, trees and leaves included, as a permitted activity rather than a free-for-all. You want the permit, a ten-foot clearance around the pile, and water or firefighting equipment standing by while it burns. Plenty of people on the county side do burn their storm brush, and for a takedown's worth of limbs that remains a legitimate way to be rid of it.

What does not work is putting grindings on that fire. Stump spoil is a wet mixture of shredded wood and soil. It will not take a flame, it smoulders for days, and the neighbours notice long before it has finished. Spoil either stays on the property in a dry spot or leaves on the truck.

The soil that came up in the plate is a separate question with an easy answer. That is dirt, and it belongs back in the hole it came out of.

What we need to know about a storm job before quoting it

• Whether the tree tipped out whole or snapped, because those are different trades in different order
• Whether the plate is still standing on edge or has already been rolled back down
• Roughly how deep and wide the crater is, paced out rather than guessed from a doorway
• Whether anything mechanical has already been over the ground and how badly it rutted
• Whether soil, gravel or creek rock is packed into the root mass
• Whether limbs and trunk wood are still on site, and where you want that material to end up
• Whether an insurer is involved, so the stump and the plate get itemised separately on paper