I guess I am a regular on here, definitely a well experienced logger, yet I had a major logging accident on Tuesday that put me into the hospital for 4 days with many more days of outpatient work to go. In short, I am hoping Homesteaders who use chainsaws can learn from what happened and how to avoid it.
The truth is I am not really sure what happened, it happened so fast I do not remember it. After returning to the scene of the crime so to speak when I got out of the hospital, I went up in the woods and looked over where I got hurt. I had just dropped a tree and was limbing it out when I neared the top. A big limb was underneath and not wanting to cut into a hummock that would dull my saw, kept my saw back to cut off the limb. I can see from the mark on the limb where my saw kicked and came back at me...like a million miles an hour, knocked off my hard hat and went flying. All I remember is hearing the saw rev. I thought the saw had lost the chain off the bar, but when I woke up, I looked down and the snow was covered in blood.
I cut
wood alone, and don't have a cell phone, so I looked at my skidder which was hooked to 7 big
trees and realized it was not going anywhere fast, so I started running for the log
yard; about a half mile away on foot. From fear and exhaustion I passed out about halfway there, woke up again to another big pile of blood and realized if I did not keep going I was going to die.
So when I got to my truck, really the whole run being a blur, I looked in the mirror, but we had an ice storm the night before and it was too icy to see anything. I sped for home and yelled for the wife to call the ambulance. She did, but while we were waiting for the ambulance, I grabbed the phone, called my truckdriver and told him my skidder was up in the woods idling and if he could shut it off. His boy came up and unhooked the skidder, grabbed my saw and hardhat and came back while they were loading me up. He later told me that the chain brake on my saw was off, there was no blood on it, and that it was in the brush idling along with my hard hat.
That is pretty amazing because it means the saw just grazed my face because it was running at full throttle. Grazed is a relative term; it cut straight to my skull, right between the eyebrows and took 20 stitches to close: 10 on the inside near my skull, and 10 on the outside. I did get two black eyes, and my forehead, sinus and jaw is aching from the collision, but they said I did not get any broken bones, nor a concussion. I took a lot of tests and underwent a lot of observation, but was finally released 4 days later, but no one is sure if the impact damaged my pituitary gland which sits right behind the bridge of the nose, right where I got hit.
What contributed to this?
Well normally a person is hurrying, using the wrong tool for the job, or is working in foul weather, but I had none of these issues. The only thing I did note was that I had sharpened my saw that morning and it was incredibly sharp. I had taken down the rakers a bit too much. I mean I have had far worse, but on that morning it was a bit "grabby". Not really bad, but I could feel when making the back cut when felling and the saw would push back some. Was that a contributing cause? I am not sure, it might have kicked anyway. Maybe the way I was trying to sneak in and cut the limb off was just using too much of the tip? Maybe I
should have just left it and pulled the tree ahead to the next one before cutting off that limb? Another thing was the saw itself. I have a 76 cc saw and yet anything under 65 cc's is designed to be anti-kickback; anything over 65 cc is not.
Ultimately a person who uses a chainsaw a lot should:
File the saw teeth down to match the rakers if they notice it is a bit too grabby.
Buy a saw that is 65 cc and under. A chainsaw of that caliber is a VERY capable saw
Be careful when limbing. I have been "bitten" three times with a chainsaw and twice while limbing