If you plan on doing any home DIY renovations, you might want to make sure all your pets are safely out of the way first. A Maryland family decided to cut down a tree in their yard, and things definitely didn’t go as planned. The tree fell the wrong way, crushed their fence, and very nearly came down on the family dog. The whole thing was caught on their Ring camera. The good news is that no one was hurt and the dog is fine. The fence and the family’s nerves are still pretty frazzled, though.
By all accounts, they tried to do it right. The homeowner, Chelsea Morgan, told Storyful that the family made all the proper cuts before starting. They even tied a rope to the tree, with someone pulling to steer its fall. It was all done exactly the way experts suggest you should do it, but that still wasn’t enough in terms of safety.
In the video, you can see a man hauling on the rope with everything he’s got. The tree ignores him, clearly. It leans the other way and topples into the backyard instead, flattening the fence and dropping right where the dog had been. “The tree did not fall the way we wanted it to,” Morgan said, saying she was shocked at the outcome.
Morgan shared the clip on TikTok with a takeaway that a lot of homeowners could use. Even when you do everything right, she wrote, a tree doesn’t always fall where you want it to. She’d worried for a while that this particular tree, close to the house and driveway, might come down on something important. It did come down on something, just not in a way that anyone expected.
Why the Tree Didn’t Fall Where They Wanted
Getting a tree to fall in a specific direction is harder than it looks. Sure, you might be wishing and hoping that it falls one way, but that isn’t always what ends up happening. A tree’s natural lean, the weight of its branches, and even the wind all pull it one way or another. Those forces don’t care about your plan. The cuts are supposed to control the fall. A notch on the target side and a back cut leave a hinge of wood meant to guide the tree down like a door on its jamb. When the lean or the weight fights that hinge, the tree can twist, split, or fall the opposite way.
A rope helps, but it isn’t a guarantee. One or two people pulling simply can’t overpower a heavy tree that’s committed to falling the other way. That’s roughly what happened here. The family did the textbook steps, and the tree still won. It’s a good illustration of why doing everything right and getting the outcome you want aren’t always the same thing with a project like this.
Why Tree Cutting is Usually a Job for the Pros
This is exactly why tree removal has a reputation as one of the more dangerous home projects. Falling trees and limbs cause serious injuries and deaths every year, often to people who assumed a job would go smoothly. A tree near a house, a fence, a driveway, or power lines raises the stakes even higher because a wrong-way fall has something expensive, or someone, to hit. In this case, the cost was a fence. It could easily have been worse.
For a big tree close to anything you care about, a professional is worth the money. Arborists have the rigging, the saws, and the experience to take a tree down in pieces or in a controlled direction, exactly the situations where DIY goes sideways. That’s not to say every backyard sapling needs a crew. It’s the tall ones, near houses and cars, that earn the call. If you plan on doing this kind of landscaping in the future, make the call to keep your pets inside, so that this doesn’t end up happening to you.