How'd it go today?

I bear hunted today and met and spoke with the director of our regional search and rescue team. I think I am going to commit to getting trained for woodland and wilderness search and rescue. I want to do something nice for society besides free wood chips.
 
Dang, Jay...I missed the posts about the e-quake before...glad y'all are OK...keep us posted.

Good deal, Chris...we do water and land search, rescue, recovery. We have done searches on land that were sometimes in local wooded areas to the most recent one which was going door-to-door with deputies looking for a missing 9 year old. No real wilderness here.

One of the keys is having someone good in charge of a team/department. I tried about 20 years ago to get involved but the man in charge was not very pro-active about training or team building. The team leader now is all about being involved and responding whenever they can use us. And the dept. leader that tasks us to a job, the local EMA director, looks after us wonderfully. Works on grants for equipment, training, etc...a good situation.
 
Wow...that resume of training/credentials is incredible. He started young and never stopped learning. That should be a top notch team...cool you have a chance to work with them.
 
I am dealing with a mixed bag of emotions right now. Earlier today I found out a good friend was in a motorcycle accident. Then to find out he is brain dead and on life support until his family can get there to say goodbye. What a day! I am really saddened for his twin sister and the emotions she is dealing with. What a day!
 
This came through my FB feed Rajan. I am truly sorry to hear of your loss. He seems a very outgoing guy. My condolences.
 
Rajan, my condolences to both you and his family, particularly his twin. May you all find peace of mind over this when and as you can. Always hard to lose people we are close with.
 
I didn't know what you were on about till I opened the link.
I didn't enjoy trimming my hedges this weekend but it was a little less energetic than that!
 
A bike accident took a very close friend of mine at an age when I was between a boy and a man and it wreaked havoc on me then.
 
I watched a large line clearance tree service take down some white pines today, Sunday. They've been at it weekends for the past few. Apparently they work 7 days per week. That schedule is surprising to me. I guess the money is there from the utility or from some grant in CT that is in place following the tree/lines mayhem after the 2 recent hurricanes, a shit load of trees by wires are slated for removal rather than trimming.

Well anyway, these guys are astoundingly, outrageously slow. Yesterday they stopped by at noonish, took down a small pine, slashed the brush, and then chilled in their idling bucket trucks for a couple hours till 4ish when they split. They usually roll up with 5 buckets and 10 or 15 guys and just kind of chip away slowly at the job. Can you imagine taking down an 80' pine entirely with a stick saw? Dicing each branch into small pieces, and then having to later chip up that rat's nest of small pieces? Watching them TD a tree, for the first 1/2 hr or so, you're pretty sure they are just trimming it. After awhile you are like, are they actually trying to take it down? Their goal is same as my company, make stumps out of trees. But the way they do it, it's hard to believe we are both doing the same task cuz the approaches, methods, speed and efficiency are radically different.

So skipping way ahead, it makes me wonder, if a tree service is large enough to handle the needs of a utility or handle a contract in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, does that automatically mean that they are slow and inefficient and unproductive? It's kind of ironic. Maybe when a company is that large, everything dumbs down to the lowest common denominator, they go as slow as you can go while still actually making forward progress. And/or, maybe their guys are making such small dollars, they can afford to have jobs take a long time. They do have all nice new looking buckets and a sweet log truck shows up long after a portion of the job is done and takes the logs.
 
It's painful. I watched a drop and walk take 4 hours with a sawyer and 3 groundies. I think they drank more coffee and ate more sammiches and doughnuts in those 4 hours than I do in a week.
 
Who pays for that kind of work? I guess we the rate payers/tax payers do, obviously.

I wouldn't be in business for more than a week or 2 with that kind of work, no way. Ive gotta be razor sharp to hope to make any money.
 
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