The difficult tree removals

Yes, with the right safety plan, but never near the live service line itself. There's a 10-metre exclusion zone around powerlines for unqualified people, and anything touching the actual network is an Energex or Essential Energy job. We work right up to where it's safe and legal, plan the drop zones properly, and coordinate with the network where we need to. Do not DIY a tree near powerlines.

The distinction that matters is which wire you're looking at. The service line running from the street to your house is one thing; the network conductors up on the poles are another, and those are the network operator's to de-energise or cover. If the job needs the power off, that gets arranged beforehand, not on the day.

Tell us early if there are lines anywhere near the tree. It changes the method, sometimes the timing, and occasionally it means the job isn't ours at all — better known at the quote than halfway up.

When the job calls for it. A tight backyard, a tree over a tiled roof, or a big trunk with no drop zone often means crane or elevated work platform. We bring in crane work under the Mobile Crane Code of Practice, and Bowie climbs and rigs section by section when an EWP can't fit. The method matches the tree, not the other way around.

Roughly how we choose between them. A crane earns its keep when the sections are heavy and there's something underneath you can't afford to hit — it lifts the weight out over the house rather than lowering it through the canopy. An EWP is quicker where there's hardstand to set up on and the tree isn't far off the street.

Climbing wins where neither machine fits, which on the Tweed Coast is a lot of backyards. It's slower, but it reaches places nothing else does and it doesn't need a driveway wide enough for outriggers.

That's our bread and butter. We lower it in controlled sections with ropes and rigging so nothing drops on the roof, the pool, the fence or the garden. The cramped, over-the-house jobs other crews knock back are the ones we're set up for.

Sectional dismantling means the tree comes down in pieces small enough to control. Each piece is roped off, cut, and lowered under tension rather than dropped, so the load never travels freely toward anything you care about. Where there's no room to swing at all, we'll work from above using an elevated work platform or rope access.

We carry $20M public liability for exactly this kind of work, and we'll walk you through the rigging plan before we start so you know what's happening over your roof. If the tree is near powerlines, tell us early — that changes the approach and can mean involving the network operator.

We plan around it. The Tweed, Byron Shire and Gold Coast are koala and native-fauna country, and there are duty-of-care rules about disturbing wildlife. If there's a chance of fauna in the tree we'll arrange a wildlife spotter-catcher and work to keep them safe. It's the right thing to do and it's the law.

What we check before anything starts: hollows and nesting holes in the trunk and larger limbs, dreys and nests up in the canopy, scratch marks on the bark, and scat around the base. Hollows matter most, because they take decades to form and they house possums, gliders and parrots that have nowhere else to go.

If we find something, the job pauses rather than proceeds. Sometimes that means waiting out a nesting period, sometimes a spotter-catcher on site for the removal itself. Either way it's far better found at the quote than with a saw already in the tree.

Yes. We cover the Tweed Coast, Byron Shire and southern Gold Coast: Tweed Heads, Kingscliff, Cabarita, Pottsville, Bilambil Heights and Byron Shire, and across the border to Coolangatta, Tugun, Currumbin, Palm Beach and Burleigh Heads. See all the areas we serve, or call us to check your suburb.