Tree work incident report 18MI213: a felled tree shifts and pins a farmer, Michigan

This page reports what the official source says. It is not legal advice: ask the office named here. This page restates one official fatality report in our own words: case 18MI213 from Michigan State University's Michigan Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation program, dated June 24, 2020. It covers a self-employed farmer who died while limbing and bucking a tree that had been felled a month earlier on his own farm. No one is named here or in the report. The table of every report we read is in the official case library for tree work incidents.

The job and the employer

The farm was 60 acres, surrounded by woods, with corn one year and soybeans the next. The man who died was self-employed, had farmed all his life and had cleared many acres of woods with a chainsaw. The report says the farm had no written health and safety plan, and the training it describes was verbal advice given to family. He worked alone that day because his son worked nights and slept in the daytime. The tree stood at the edge of the field, and its branches had struck the combine at the previous harvest. His son had wanted only the branches cut off, but he wanted the whole tree down. It was felled a month before the incident, and a chore list in the report lists the tree as a chore to finish before a major holiday.

What happened

The felled tree had a large branch off the trunk in the shape of a Y. It was not lying flat: the report says it rested on one arm of the Y and on the stump and its root flare, and the family described it as hung up on the stump. At an unknown date after felling, the man and his son had trimmed some limbs and the tree shifted, and his son told him not to go out and cut it alone.

On the day, he left the house around 10:00 a.m., came back at about 10:30 a.m. for his trailer with toolbox, chainsaw and other gear, and drove back to the tree. The weather was fair and dry, in the mid-30s F with east wind gusting 26 to 29 mph. When he did not come home for lunch his wife phoned and got no answer, searched by car, and called their son, who arrived first. He found his father pinned and unresponsive under the trunk, cut a section of the tree off with his own saw and called 911. The man was declared dead at the scene. The death certificate lists multiple injuries, and toxicology was negative. Nobody saw it happen, and Michigan's workplace safety agency did not open a compliance investigation.

From fresh sawdust and the position of the saw, the report concludes he had started on the north side, then moved to the south side and begun cutting branches on the raised limbs. It hypothesises he cut a limb meant to let the raised trunk roll north. Instead, the report says, a supporting branch broke away and the tree rolled south, and the limb that struck him measured 23 to 24 inches across.

Contributing factors the report lists

Three: an inadequate hazard assessment of the felled tree, with the notes that forest floor soil behaves differently from hard-packed field soil and that trees at a forest edge behave differently from trees inside a forest; safe limbing and bucking practices not followed; and working alone.

What the report recommends

The report recommends recognising the difference in soil between forest trees and fence line trees, and suggests backstopping trunk sections that have impaled limbs, for example by chaining the tree to a tractor, supporting it with a loader, blocking it, or backing a tractor up to the trunk from the cutting side. It recommends a hazard assessment, standing uphill where possible, not working alone and wearing protective equipment, and cites the limbing and bucking sections of the ANSI Z133 arborist safety standard and Michigan's logging standard, which it says bars working alone on felling or skidding and requires a checking procedure when a faller is out of hearing range. It recommends a check-in arrangement with another person for anyone working alone, with phone coverage confirmed. Last, it recommends calling emergency responders and following their instructions before removing a crushing weight from a trapped person, while noting this was not a factor here because the family said he was already dead. For another lone-worker tree death see report 17MI136, and for how the standards are described see the guide to OSHA tree care status.

To correct or remove an entry, write to the address at the foot of this page.