Tree Lopping, Removal, Pruning and Mulching in the Dandenong Ranges

From the Blog

A major part of our business is advance stabilisation work for customers that have suffered storm damage or sudden branch failure.

We have an armada of heavy lifting, winches and technical rigging equipment to service trees that pose an immediate hazard to life or property.

After heavy wind and rain, trees can often fail in a variety of places. In most cases these are an expected part of the forest life cycle.

Unfortunately, other times these may be a significant asset or feature to a home owner.

When the tree fails, often the home owner will need to assess the hazards and potential costs of further degeneration.

While these decisions are being made, any immediate hazards needs to neutralised so that decisions are not made under pressure and haste.

We have access rigging devices such as heavy blocks and tackles, jacks, cables, zero stretch ropes, lowering devices through to cranes, helicopters, excavators, harvesters.

We service all of the Dandenong Ranges in the Shire of Yarra Ranges.

  • Belgrave
  • Kallista
  • Kalorama
  • Macclesfield
  • Menzies Creek
  • Monbulk
  • Mount Dandenong
  • Olinda
  • Sassafras
  • Seville
  • Sherbrooke
  • Silvan
  • The Patch

Some of our services include

Contact us for more information!

We had two interesting jobs on today – one at William Ricketts Sanctuary and another at Burnham Beeches.

This brief post is about the job at Burnham Beeches where we used a helicopter to remove some storm damaged limbs from the forth story roof of the building.

There was insufficient access to use a crane, and a large crane would still not do the job as efficiently. There were no significant highpoints within reach of the roof top, and extensive gardens either side of the building would not allow material to be thrown from the roof.

The sheer volume of the branches, spread over two storeys would have meant they would need to be propped to stop the branches from falling further and doing any more damage.

When we release a longer video, there will be a more in depth explanation of why we used a helicopter for tree lopping and storm damage in the circumstance – compared to conventional rigging or craning techniques.

Special thanks to Mike Dunn from Heli-Serv (www.heli-serv.com) and Tim Shannon.

The large dead Mountain Ash seen in this video was hanging precariously over the newly built Olinda Falls viewing platform. In particularly, three large limbs were pulling a lot of the trees weight.
At the base of the tree, the stump was so severely burnt out that only a small semi-circle shell around 80mm thick held the tree. This was extremely brittle and extended nearly 40′ above, where it formed back into a chimney.

Around 120′ from ground level was a large bee’s nest. The risk that was facing Parks Victoria meant something needed to be done to mitigate the hazard so as to allow visitors to use the platform as expected.
In this situation Graeme elected to pre-rig the three limbs, and then cut them with explosives. This had a number of safety advantages;
- No-one needed to be under the tree as it was shock loaded with the limb being cut-off
- Graeme didn’t need to be in the tree as it could potentially pull out of the ground, or snap off above him as the tree was loaded up by the branches
- The limbs were so long that traversing out and lopping was not an option given the tree’s condition
- Long term exposure at 80′ was likely to attract unwanted attention from the Bee’s nest

The video shows one limb being severed with explosives, and then being caught on rope.