Cleaning up from an ice storm is a more involved process that it might seem at first. That’s not a surprise, but the extent has been larger than expected. What I didn’t expect is that ineptitude in another country would add even more complications.
I’ll start with the reasonable part. That Ego chainsaw that I was waiting on a month ago took nearly four weeks to arrive. That’s no surprise. I’m certain that the demand for chainsaws of all types spiked the day after the storm passed. The saw finally arrived last week and with other stuff going on it took a couple of days to get through the instructions, because nobody wants to accidentally sever a femoral artery. Then it took a bit of time to get over the intimidation factor of using a tool that can do something like that in a second. A nice day arrived so I put chainsaw oil in the unit and donned protective chaps and got them adjusted, then safety glasses, a hard hat with a screen and ear protectors. Then I found some smaller downed branches to start applying my new knowledge of how to cut trees. Finding a little success there, I carried on with larger branches. For years, I’ve been using a bow saw to cut off tree branches and break stuff down, and much of what I’ve learned doing that (thankfully without serious injury) works just as well with a power tool. there are two huge differences between an electric chainsaw and a gas powered one. Most notably, ear protection isn’t really required. The amount of noise it makes is minimal. Then there’s the ease of starting it. No jerking on cords and tweaking chokes to get it running. No either leaving it running while moving things around or trying to restart it each time. Push a button, squeeze the trigger, it runs. Just another reminder that powering things through an engine that has to contain powerful explosions is silly.
Two days later and we’ve got about ten piles of stuff broken down into pieces that are small enough to move.
Part of an apple tree downed by the storm, cut up.
Branches of a cedar tree
The plan is to break down much of this wood for use as kindling. We’re going to have a lot of it when we’re done, so it made sense to get a rack for that purpose, and here’s where we get into politics. We found a supplier of “outdoor stuff” and a rack that looked like it would meet our requirements. I placed the order. The next day we got a tracking number and a “guaranteed” delivery date. This highlights one of my common complaints about online stores: as soon as a shipping label is generated, the order goes into “shipped” status, but really it can take days before the order is actually prepared and shipped. Take the tracking number over to the shipping company’s website, and you get “we don’t have that package yet”.
But carriers aren’t perfect either. When the package didn’t show up and the carrier still didn’t have any information the day after the promised delivery date, I reached out to the vendor. As it turns out, the item was out of stock and I got a refund and profuse apologies. But I still need a rack, so I went to Plan B, returned to their site and discovered that almost everything they sell is now out of stock. Now why would that be? Because everything they sell is made in China and this company probably brought product into the US first, then shipped it up to their Canadian warehouse, and thanks to the current administration, China isn’t shipping anything to the US. My hope is that we’ll soon see the US cut out of this process, with direct shipments to Canada, but like anything else, that’s going to take some time.
On to plan C, where we find a supplier who still has stock and get some kindling racks on order. This is successful.
After hauling all suitably-sized branches up to the garage, I put the chainsaw and a log splitter to use to cut everything up into kindling-sized pieces.
Wood for kindling, some split, some not.
Split wood, ready to move
And finally I stacked them in our new “Plan C” rack:
Kindling on a rack.
By the time we’re done, I expect that rack to be filled to capacity, and we have a second one just like this one that we’ll use for smaller pieces.
Then we’ll be ready for Step Four, which will be call in the professionals to handle that Mulberry tree and several others. In turn that will require another round of long splitting and kindling-making. By the time fall arrives, we might even have the whole mess cleaned up!
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