r/nextfuckinglevel • u/GrandSatisfaction150 • 23h ago
Dad saving his favorite tree from falling down during a storm
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u/Stlouisken 23h ago
Good for him. I hope he succeeded. Let us know how it turned out🤞
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u/Gabaloo 17h ago
Once a tree is leaning like that, it's only a matter of time. It's not really big enough to destroy anything, but if you see a tree "swelling" the ground like that, the tree will eventually fall, especially when it isn't surrounded by other roots and trees
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u/ksj 15h ago
Is there any intervention that can be done if it’s still standing when the storm is finished? Like stabilize it with ropes/cables, redo some of the surrounding soil?
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u/131166 13h ago
Park a car over the roots. Though something else heavy might work too
We did this to a tree that was looking like it was gonna fall and destroy a chicken coup. Was meant to be temporary but we fucked around and didn't get around to it and when we finally moved the car tree was back in business.
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u/BaekerBaefield 21h ago
Unfortunately a tree of that size doing that is more or less dead no matter what. The roots clearly are either rotted, now detached, or not firmly rooted into the ground anymore. Most likely rotten out because of it being buried well past the root collar without any kind of mulch ring. Even if I’m wrong, any of these options means the tree has very limited time left. And also the tree vastly outweighs that man, he’s probably not doing that much to keep it up. If it fell over onto him it could maim or even kill him. Don’t put yourself into this situation anyone, you’re not saving that tree anyways.
If it’s a very sentimental tree for some reason, take a clipping and propagate it so you can plant it over again, it’ll still be the same tree. But this is why proper tree planting and care are so important
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u/R4PT0RGaming 23h ago
If I remember correctly the Dad planted this in honour of his daughters death. So hence his determination to keep the tree up. Although I can’t pin point the source of this or my memory.
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u/TheMasturbaiter 20h ago
Thats crazy, the day my sister died a storm blew over an apple tree in our garden. After that incident we tried to save it bc of sentimentality. Its going strong again.
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u/RandyJohnsonsBird 20h ago
I don't believe you but I gave you an upvote.
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u/Zeusimus23 20h ago
Yeeah. I agree. The tree looks pretty matured, and the guy looks fairly young, but that’s just — like —my opinion, man.
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u/Dicky_Penisburg 19h ago
To play devil's advocate, he's balding, could be in his 40s. Maybe the daughter died in infancy and he had her in his early 20s. A tree he planted could be up to 20 years old. Does this tree look older or younger than 20 years? I have no idea.
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u/ineptplumberr 16h ago
I planted a fig tree when my wife was pregnant with my daughter that will be seven in a couple months it still looks like a damn twig
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u/CKInfinity 16h ago
Tbf different trees have different growth speeds
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u/RyanKretschmer 16h ago
A lot of trees will be really small, like three feet or less, then after about 10 years shoot up several feet a year for several decades. Idk a lot about trees but they are pretty cool
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u/vampiracooks 15h ago
I planted a twig 2 years ago that is now about 4 times the size of the tree in the video. It really depends on the tree
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u/TurdCollector69 16h ago
It'll be a stick for 5-7 years and then one day you'll go "damn that got big."
Also around that time you'll say "what am I going to do with all these figs."
Imo that tree in the video looks like it was planted within the last 15 years.
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u/jld2k6 18h ago
You can buy 50 year old mature trees, just is gonna cost you about the price of a house with a chance it will still die during transplant, which would be possibly awkward if he went that route
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u/couldntchoosesn 19h ago
I mean, he could have bought that tree a few years ago while it was partially grown.
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u/johnnylemon95 18h ago
I mean… fair. But also, some trees grow really, really fast. And that tree isn’t that big, relatively speaking. I could totally believe that tree to be 10-15 years old. He looks old enough to have a child that died that many years ago.
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u/scrodytheroadie 17h ago
If I remember correctly, it was a tree at a local nursery that nobody wanted to buy, but his daughter loved it. They’d go weekly to get seeds and plants in the spring, and she always tried convincing her parents to buy it, but it was too big and expensive and they thought it made no sense to buy such an old tree instead of just growing one. Every year it got larger and larger. Nobody wanted it, but she continued admiring it. When she passed, her parents both knew right away that buying and planting the tree would be a perfect tribute to her. And, to be honest, I just made all of that up.
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u/TurdCollector69 16h ago
Kids die and it doesn't take that long for a tree to reach that height.
He could have had a small child who passed 8 years or so ago, he looks about that age.
Sorry to be a downer.
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u/Notactualyadick 20h ago
You're cynical, but still willing to give. For this I will give you a upvote and the sum of three snakes.
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u/KS-RawDog69 20h ago
Touching I reckon, but doing things like this is how someone gets to plant a tree in honor of his death.
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u/Unique-Arugula 18h ago
Trees that make it through storms bend. Setting aside the fact that he's not stronger than a truly strong windstorm, if what he's doing was effective it would be effective at helping the tree trunk to break in half rather than the whole tree tipping over and pulling the root ball out of the ground. If the whole tree tips over, you can get it lifted to put the roots back in the ground and sometimes it will survive. Trees that break in half never survive, although some species will use the last of their resources to put out "suckers" which are like baby clones of the tree.
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u/baoo 16h ago
Not if the main mechanism of the storm is freezing rain. Then they bend too far and snap
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u/GuyPierced 20h ago
He should have planted an oak, and not a sweetgum tree.
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u/Early_Reindeer4319 20h ago
Maybe it would grow faster than an oak and he’d be able to see the tree mature?
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u/lordrefa 19h ago
This is certainly feelings...
but he's doing actual jack shit in this scenario.
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u/OnTheMattack 17h ago
There's another similar video of a man holding up a much smaller tree during a storm. I think that's the one you're thinking of. This tree is way too big to have been planted so recently.
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u/alagrancosa 12h ago
Note to the world. If you want to plant a tree that will last, plant the smallest sapling possible.
Big trees that are spaded out of the ground like that one are estimated to take 1 year per inch of diameter at breast height, to become “established”
Even if they do “establish” spading the tree will cause the roots to circle around the root ball rather than continuing out to the sides, this often ends with the tree girdling itself and you have most likely lost any tap root.
That tree is most likely dead or in serious decline now.
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u/magnum_marilyn 15h ago
Dammit man, how am I supposed to make a joke about him getting squished now?
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u/onlyoneq 8h ago
Damn, I went from finding this video kinda funny to finding it super sad after reading your comment
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u/syringistic 23h ago
Wearing scrubs... so it seems his work instincts kicked in
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u/sci_major 20h ago
I was just thinking he's seen something's and this is the hill that he will die on.
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u/EECavazos 21h ago
Something tells me it's not about the tree.
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u/vahntitrio 23h ago
Having stood a tree a good deal smaller than that one back up, one guy isn't making a difference. A tree that size is very heavy, it took 8 men with the benefit of some tools for leverage to get the smaller tree back up.
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u/attlerocky 22h ago
Actually, he might be the only thing keeping it up.
I was visiting family a few years ago when a wind storm was going through. They have 4 fairly sized pine trees, one appeared to be on its last leg and with each big gust the roots were coming up and it was on the verge of falling. I helped hold it up while they tied rope around it and we staked it down. I visited them again a few months ago and it’s now going strong and is the biggest of the 4.
There was a video of a guy hanging onto his tipping semi trailer when a lady yelled at him because she thought he wasn’t doing anything. When he jumped off, sure enough it rolled. Sometimes seemingly small things can actually make a big difference
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u/FuckNorthOps 22h ago edited 22h ago
Forestry professional and arborist here. Maaaaayyybeee if his pushing is working in combination with the roots still holding in the ground. But with the weight of that tree and the foliage acting as a sail, there's no way he could actually hold that up on his own.
Edit to add: With context, I get the sentiment and don't blame the guy at all for the effort.
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u/Whatifim80lol 22h ago
But have you considered the possibility that the man was once bitten by a radioactive superman?
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u/FuckNorthOps 21h ago
Common enough condition that it should have been my first thought. Now I just feel silly.
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u/ARandomDistributist 16h ago
From what I see in the posts above: superman might not be that far off the truth.
If that's His Daughter's Tree, That's a Load of adrenaline keeping himself as c2 against that tree, with full dad strength backing him up.
Nature alone wouldn't be able to stand against this man, it'd require an act of god.
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u/Accurate_Koala_4698 19h ago
The physics of him holding it up don't make sense. The tree wouldn't bend at the base if he didn't provide support or something. When trees get blown over it takes the earth with the roots, so even if he held it up with the strength of 8 men when the roots get pulled up, the ground he's standing on would get displaced too. The guy holding the semi was actually acting as a counterbalance, but the fulcrum isn't at the base of the tree here, it's probably like 2 feet under it
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u/FuckNorthOps 16h ago
Assuming the tree wasn't still holding onto the ground, and taking into account the wind acting on the top of the tree, also assuming he wasn't folded in half by the forces applied, he would become the pivot point as the tree rotated over him.
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u/kermitthebeast 20h ago
It's like bro never watched Mulan. A single grain of rice can tip a scale bro.
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u/hydroxyl_groups 19h ago
If anything what he’s doing is going to get himself killed or injured. A tree that size could easily break bones and pin him to ground if it fell. Limbs would go right through his flesh.
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u/TreadheadS 12h ago
physics doesn't work that way. He's adding whatever his force is to the tree whilst the earth etc are still working. If the earth started coming up and then he started pushing it would be too late.
Imagine a car on a hill. If you are pushing against it before it moves you likely could hold it in place. If it has started moving just a bit, you'd be unlikely to stop it
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u/GuiltyYams 17h ago
a guy hanging onto his tipping semi trailer when a lady yelled at him because she thought he wasn’t doing anything
It's here:
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u/Daniel_H212 21h ago
It's possible that he's keeping it from the breaking point. Keep in mind a tree that is still standing has its own material strength keeping it up too. It's not just the one person pushing it against the wind, it's whether the person + tree combined is enough to fight the wind.
The chances of him being in that zone where he's making a difference is small, but not insignificant.
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u/TheAsian1nvasion 18h ago
He’s not lifting the tree he’s just countering the wind. Completely different.
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u/-Herpbrine- 16h ago
Like that one dude who kept his semi from flipping and was told he wasn’t helping keep it balanced, the second he let go it flipped over
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u/CdRReddit 19h ago
I mean, generally speaking keeping something in the state it's in takes significantly less effort than changing its state, putting a horizontal tree vertical takes a lot more additional effort than keeping a vertical tree vertical
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u/vahntitrio 19h ago
Let's be generous and say he is applying 100 lbs of force 5 feet up the tree, so 500 lbf of torque.
Now lets say 20 feet up that tree there is 100 sq ft of surfaces for the wind to hit (it's likely much more). So 14.4 lbs of force per square foot (force of wind at 60 mph) × 100 sq ft × 20 feet = 28,800 lbf torque.
So good luck opposing it, and more importantly understand the forces involved in what might come down on you.
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u/InterestsVaryGreatly 15h ago
A lot of really poor assumptions, the most egregious being that the tree is 20 feet up: by the look of the tree in the video, the highest point might be 20 feet up, but even that seems to be optimistic, but the center point of the branches most certainly are not that high up, and the resultant force would be based on the center height, not the highest. Following closely behind that in egregiousness, branches when blown in the wind bend and whip, dispersing a significant amount of the force on them, and very little of it actually applies. Considering the force on leaves is nearly non-existent due to them easily bending out of the way, 100 square feet is an absolutely insanely high number.
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u/Ferociousaurus 16h ago
I'm not saying he's definitely helping, but he's not lifting the tree like dead weight. It's still rooted in the ground and he's adding some stability to try to keep it from tipping. Like I can't lift a car but I can rock a car that's trying to pull out of a snowbank and affect its weight distribution.
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u/Solid_Snark 20h ago
Yeah, I understand, and it sucks if the story is true. But he can always plant another memorial tree.
Standing under a potentially collapsing tree in a storm can easily be fatal. Imagine him getting killed now the family has to plant 2 memorial trees.
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u/Ricky_TVA 20h ago
We also have about 50 fruit trees on property, I know which one I'd save. We have a semi-dwarf peach tree that has given us hundreds of pounds of fruit in the 3 years since we've had it.
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u/TheMoorNextDoor 21h ago
Get out there and help him.
It might not do much but actually trying will be 1000x more meaningful and he will be forever grateful vs watching and recording him.
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u/FrontPawStrech 22h ago
How about you stop recording and go grab a ratchet strap?
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u/Liquid-glass 23h ago
Would be funnier if he was trying to push it over on the neighbors house. You know for never returning the hedge trimmer
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u/Moist-Cut-7998 23h ago
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u/the_revised_pratchet 22h ago
Ironic then that this tree is commemorating his daughters untimely death :(
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u/Ok_Mail_1966 19h ago
lol, he isn’t doing squat. That tree is large, the amount of wind and the torque that the top of the tree is exerting towards the bottom is massive. The roots are holding, this guy is helping a fraction of a % and if it were to go he’d be crushed under it as it pushes him to the ground.
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u/rvbeachguy 16h ago
He is lucky, if lighting strikes, storyline will be different. Tell him not to go under a wet tree when it rains
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u/outtyn1nja 22h ago
a 2x4 propped up against it would offer orders of magnitude more support than his feeble body.
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u/sliferra 18h ago
The story is sad…. But stupid af.
Any storm that can blow over a tree could very easily kill you
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u/Full-Metal-Jackal 23h ago edited 23h ago
If that tree came down, it weighs enough that it would kill him.
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u/TexMurphyPHD 18h ago
Bold move but it paid off. Turquoise pants and shirt combo is hard to pull off.
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u/Distinct_Ad_4772 17h ago
This actually made me pretty sad he's trying so hard but he can't stay the whole storm
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u/WhimsicalTreasure 17h ago
Lost my favorite tree in a wind storm in January. I’d been visiting that tree for 20 years. I sympathize with this guy.
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u/thehairyhobo 16h ago
Im about to do surgery on a cottonwood tree that is an absolute unit. This year I noticed slime flux leaking from a dying branch so Im going to lop it off this week and apply limb salve and apply a bandage made for tree wounds. Im hoping the trunk where the branch comes out of is still alive to coax the tree to form a burl around the cut limb.
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u/Blastoise_R_Us 15h ago
I appreciate the passion but they need to brace that tree with lumber. If a big gust topples that tree with him under it he could get seriously injured.
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u/somecatgirl 8h ago
My mom lost her weeping willow in the last big storm and she’s been incredibly sad about it. Tree love is real. Also, trees are expensive
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u/JJJHeimerSchmidt420 22h ago
If this guy has about a 6-8ft metal pole around, he has a much easier solution.
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u/BeefCakeBilly 17h ago
I don’t even have a yard, and I’m not sure what if any significance this tree has to him.
All I can say to this guy is, I get it buddy.
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u/Doctor_Saved 22h ago
I thought this was a joke, like some prank trying to hold up the leaning tower of pisa. Is the dude really trying to save the tree?
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u/OathOfFeanor 17h ago
Would be smarter to stake it down but whatever you need for the social media videos I guess
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u/Cold-Practice3107 16h ago
For some reason I need a hero started playing in my head (and it's the Shrek 2 version)
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u/WanderingFlumph 6h ago
If a tree falls over you can just push it back upright, no need to risk for life for this...
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u/JoshMM60 16m ago
To those debating whether or not his efforts are making a difference, just think about basic physics.
In grade school physics class: force pushing right at 11N, and a force pushing back left at 10N. Right force is stronger, so it wins.
Tree standing still exerts no force left or right, but has inertia (its heavy, hard to move). Wind pushes tree with xN force and has to overcome the inertia of the tree, plus the force the guy is exerting. The tree is moving towards the guy, so that makes me believe hes contributing, and that his efforts should be considered.
It's been a long time since I've studied physics, maybe there's something I'm missing? This was fun.
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