Caterpillar moving a 100+ year old 518,000 pound Oak TREE

[mjncad]

Caterpillar moving a 100+ year old 518,000 pound Oak TREE

100 Year Old Compton Oak Move Successful in League City - YouTube

[Bellafx]

Nothing to say, except IMPRESSIVE.

[mikehaugen]

This was posted a couple weeks ago, but is no less impressive. I would assume that the majority of this was volunteer/ donations but I wonder how much this project would actually cost. I had no idea it would take that much equipment to drag that across the ground, and they were still struggling a little.

All I know is I would not want to be the one operating the dozer when they were pulling it into the hole!

[Gary Fowler]

A friend of mine worked on a construction job where a new parking facility was to be built for the new chemical plant workers. It had 5 huge oak trees that were going to be destroyed but the clients staff protested and convinced management that they could move them about 500 yards and replant. KBR was doing the construction and contracted with an old man who had built a huge version of the tree spades like the ones you see on back of trucks that you see digging up small trees for planting in sub-divisions. His was on a huge track crane frame and everything related to the shovel was home built. He moved one tree per day for $100,000 per tree. He contracts all over the USA to move 100 foot tall trees. It moved into the tree with halve the circle opened and then it closed about the tree. He then proceeded to push the shovels into the ground till they were fully engaged into an upside down pyramid. He then raised the whole thing up and walked it to where he had removed the same size hunk of dirt as he now had around the tree. He lowered the whole thing into the ground, removed the shovels and walked the rig back to get another tree. The action took a full day for each tree and he guaranteed that the trees would live.
A lot simplier and lots less equipment than this company used and a heck of a lot quicker than a month for one tree.