The before photo says it plainly. This DeBary tree was dead, stripped of leaves and holding nothing but bare, brittle limbs over the property. A dead tree is a different animal than a live one to take down. The wood is dry and unpredictable, limbs can snap off with no warning, and you cannot trust any part of it to hold weight, which rules out climbing it. So we brought in a cherry picker and worked the whole removal from the bucket. The crew was supported by the machine the entire time, never standing on the dead wood, cutting the limbs and the trunk into pieces from a stable platform beside the tree. At Roeling Green Lawns, a dead tree is one we would rather take out sooner than later, because every storm that rolls through Volusia County is one more chance for it to come down on its own terms instead of ours.
Working from the cherry picker, we took the tree down in sections from the top, roping and lowering the bigger pieces so nothing dropped where it could do damage. Dead limbs want to shatter when they hit, so keeping the drop zone roped off and the pieces controlled kept both the crew and the property safe. Once the trunk was down, plenty of work was left: bucking it into rounds, dragging out the brush, and hauling every piece off so the yard was clear. We do not leave the wood behind for the homeowner to deal with. This kind of tree removal is bread and butter for our crew, whether the tree died of age, disease, or a lightning strike, and getting a dead one out before it fails is one of the smartest calls a property owner can make. If the same property has trees still worth saving, we also handle lift-assisted tree trimming in DeBary to keep the healthy ones in good shape.