Tree Service in Beulaville, NC

A job we did in Beulaville

A $3,500 tree craned out of a barn roof

October 2, 2020. A thunderstorm — not a hurricane, which is the part worth noticing — put a tree straight through the roof of a barn.

A tree resting inside a building is a different job from a tree on the ground, because the building has become part of the rigging problem: cut it in the wrong order and the barn takes the rest of the load. There was open ground alongside, so we craned it out of the roof rather than cutting it apart in place, then removed the rest of the tree.

The whole job came to $3,500.

Beulaville, and what it does to trees

• Beulaville is in Duplin County, and the flood history here is not abstract. When Hurricane Floyd came through on September 16, 1999, the National Weather Service recorded that “the Northeast Cape Fear River at Chinquapin crested at 23.51 feet, a record that stood until flooding associated with Hurricane Florence in 2018.” Chinquapin is the gauge just down the river from here.

  Source: NWS Wilmington — Hurricane Floyd

• The same NWS summary records that “newspaper reports stated around 60 square miles of Duplin County was underwater,” and that three people in the county died trying to drive across flooded roads.

  Source: NWS Wilmington — Hurricane Floyd

• What that means for trees, in our experience, is saturated ground. A root plate that has sat in water loses its grip long before the canopy shows anything is wrong, and the trees we are called to after a wet year are frequently ones that simply leaned over rather than broke.

Questions we get from Beulaville