What Is the Safest Way to Clear Brush Piles on a Wooded Lot

The brush pile does one job for a property owner: it holds the limbs that have been cut until somebody can haul them away. Every teardown that redding junk hauling bit blitz com has logged on a wooded lot around Redding shows the same thing, which is that a pile left through one dry summer is a hauling problem and a fire problem at once.

Cutting to length before anything moves

Limbs get bucked to lengths a person can lift, usually about four to six feet for loading by hand into a dump trailer. Longer pieces stick out of the box and tangle with the tailgate. On the oak and pine lots around Palo Cedro, the trunk sections come off first so the lighter branches sit on top and the load stays flat for the drive down to the landfill.

What lives in an old pile

Piles that have sat for a season become homes for rodents, wood rats, and sometimes rattlesnakes in the warm months of the Sacramento Valley. The crew pulls the top layer with a rake or a long hook before any hand goes into it, and never reaches into the middle. Wasps nest in hollow limbs. Leather gloves, eye protection and boots with ankle height are the minimum on any pile older than a year.

Chainsaw handling and stacking

A chainsaw stays off the ground and out of the dirt, because grit dulls the chain within minutes. Cuts are made on the pile side facing away from the body, with the bar tip never buried in a tangle. Pieces that are under tension, such as a limb pinned under a larger trunk, get cut from the relief side first. The loaded trailer then gets a ratchet strap over the top every few feet.

Summer fire danger

A brush pile in July on dry ground near Shasta Lake or Whiskeytown Lake is the same fuel that fire crews clear for defensible space. Sparks from a saw or from a hot muffler parked over dry grass can start a fire, so the work happens in the early morning, a water can sits within reach, and the saw is fueled well away from the pile. Dry grass under the stack gets cut before the truck backs in.

Where it all ends up

Clean brush goes to a green waste drop and gets ground into mulch. Painted lumber, metal fence wire or old tires found in the pile get separated, because they cannot ride with yard waste. Whatever has to go to the landfill is weighed on its own ticket, so the clean material is not charged at the mixed rate.