In December we had a massive storm. The heavy rain made the evening news weather report in Melbourne. Our gauge said we received 70mm over two hours with 50mm of that in half an hour.

In that half an hour there were two hailstorms. Big hailstones driven hard by a horizontal wind. I stood inside, looking out, then hastily stepped back from the window, thinking it might smash with the force of the stones hitting it. The roofline gave no shelter to the flat flight path, and water poured through the doorframe.

While we were mopping up, round the front of the house the guttering was ripped off the wall with the weight of the water and hail. it hung, still intact, but twisted, and it took me a day afterwards to repair it.

When the deluge died down I went out to check. The paddocks were awash, and in some spots it was almost up to my knees.

An amazing storm.

Down the road from us, about 2 KM, the same storm sandblasted the hills that face us along the Great Alpine Road. Two houses were smashed by water, mud and loosened rocks pouring down the hill through a gully. Post event one looks salvageable, the other a write-off. The sludge blocked the road, and that, too, made the news.

But the big thing that happened at our place wasn’t noticed by us until the next day.

Our property has quite a few very old, and very large, river red gums. One had been brought down by the storm, and lay smashed in the paddock by the river. The debris was piled high, and I went to have a look.

The good news was that it looks like we’ll have enough firewood for next winter. The tree was more than a metre in diameter at the base, and at least 30 metres high. (The white stick in the middle of the photo is exactly one metre long.) It was an interesting one. It had previously survived a fire, and just the week before visitors had been inspecting it, looking at the fire-hollowed base and wondering at its determined will to live.

That hollow core was the week spot, and the whole thing had snapped above that line. But unfortunately, it hadn’t snapped well. The remainder of the trunk was precariously balanced on a thin blade of timber, hovering some four metres up in the air. The suspended timber weighted hundreds of kilos, and there was no telling if it would roll off, or gradually crush the balancing wedge that was holding it up.

I walked down and looked at it a few times over the next few days, thinking about what to do. It looked incredibly dangerous. Its height meant if it fell the wrong way it could snap any taught chain if I tried to pull it off the stump. Its sheer size meant it would be hard to get out of the way if you were standing near and it dropped.

The upper branches mostly smashed to short lengths. “Broke every bone” was how it looked. Partly because of the sheer force of the fall, but also because the upper branches were mostly weakened limbs, partially hollowed by insects. But the lower trunk looked like beautiful hardwood.

The option of just leaving it there until it fell wasn’t a good one. That might be years, but more to the point, it fell across the fence and had broken down a few fence posts, and snapped the six lines of wiring. To use the paddock I would need to fix the fence, and I couldn’t do that with tonnes of wood lying across it. In the end I decided to call in someone else. Mal has an onsite lumber-milling business. He made me a great offer….he would come and get the tree off the stump, and roll it off the fence. At the same time he’d assess the quality of the wood and suggest what could be done with it if it was worth salvaging, and quote for that second round of work.

It took longer than he’d estimated, and it was pretty scary. Initially he tried using webbed lifting tackle to pull it off the stump, after first removing a couple of side-branches that had speared deeply into the ground and were effectively balancing it. The tree groaned, and rolled slightly, but didn’t seem keen to move. Mal got the tugs into a rhythm, rocking the tree back and forth.

With a violent SNAP! the webbing tore, and a buckle richocheted like a bullet off the top of his car, missing the windscreen narrowly. If that had been me on a tractor it would have come at my back at head height, too fast to dodge.

There was a pause and a rethink. Mal fished out the longest chain saw I have ever seen, and, with his eye on the balanced stump and the cutting are simultaneously, cut through from both sides to give it a break path and expected fall line.

But it hung on, the supporting stump had no intention of going. I suspect the downward pressure of the suspended stump was part of the problem.

So then it was wedges, whacked in with terrific force. Mal’s high tech long plastic wedges disappeared into an enormous crack. I went off and came back with my “domestic” wedges, and then, once more hitched up to his car, he managed to jerk it to breaking point. There was a fearsome cracking, and the whole thing came down with an earth-shaking jolt.

From there it was hard work, but relatively uncomplicated.

For Mal..

I didn’t know how to wrap a chain round an enormous log and gracefully roll it. I do now, and have used the technique on smaller logs which will be fence posts shortly.

The stump is good wood. Mal painted it to seal the ends, and gave me a price to mill it in a few months. Then it will need more time to dry, and possibly need professional kiln drying. But I have two logs, about three metres long and both more than a metre in diameter. There’s a dining table in there, at least.

I’ve started cutting the broken branches. I’m trying to get a few fence-posts out of it, but any wood not up to that task it good four our fireplace. So far I’ve cut more than two cubic metres of wood, and there’s easily another eight to go.