Forestry Contractor and Felling Insurance

The single biggest difference between forestry and most outdoor trades is how long it takes to reach somebody who is hurt.

A harvesting site may be a long way down a forest road, with no mobile coverage, no address an ambulance can find, and one or two people working. A chainsaw injury, a crush from a stem or a machine, or a cardiac event means somebody has to raise an alarm, guide help in, and keep a casualty alive meanwhile. Lone working makes it worse, because the person who could raise the alarm may be the casualty. This is why the sector's safety guidance is built around communication and location rather than around equipment alone.

So the arrangements are what an insurer assesses. A means of communication that actually works on that site, tested rather than assumed, including a satellite or radio alternative where there is no signal; a grid reference or what three words location for every site shared with the emergency services if needed; a check in procedure with defined intervals and an escalation if somebody does not call; first aid training appropriate to chainsaw injuries including catastrophic bleeding, with a kit on the person rather than in the vehicle; and a rule about lone working in high risk operations.

Every experienced forestry contractor treats windblown sites differently, and the reason is worth stating because clients frequently do not.

A windblown stem is under tension in directions nobody can see. Root plates are partly lifted and can slam back. Stems are stacked across each other so cutting one releases others. A stem that looks felled is spring loaded. The recognised fatal scenarios in forestry concentrate here: a root plate returning, a stem releasing and striking an operator, and a chainsaw cut into a stem under compression. After a storm there is also commercial pressure, because a windblown crop deteriorates and the owner wants it cleared quickly.

So the method has to be deliberate and the pricing has to allow for it. Mechanised clearance in preference to chainsaw work wherever a machine can reach, assessment of each stem's tension before any cut, no manual felling into windblow that a machine should take, exclusion of anybody not involved in the operation, and a refusal to work a windblown site to the same rates and timescales as standing timber. A contractor who prices windblow as a premium operation rather than a volume one is managing the risk rather than carrying it.

The commercial claims in forestry are not dramatic. They are about what the site looks like afterwards.

Thinning and extraction damage the trees that stay: bark stripped by a forwarder, stems scarred by a crane, roots damaged by machine traffic. That reduces the value of a crop the owner keeps for another twenty years. Extraction rutting compacts soil and damages forest roads, drains get blocked or crushed, culverts fail, and a wet site worked in the wrong season can take years to recover. Owners, agents and public forest bodies all inspect afterwards and all have views.

So the agreements and the records matter as much as the felling. Extraction routes agreed before work starts, brash mats used on soft ground rather than driving on soil, a stated position on which seasons and conditions the site can be worked, damage to retained trees discussed as an accepted tolerance rather than left to argument, drains and culverts identified and protected, and a photographic record of the site condition before starting. On public forest and estate contracts those expectations are usually written down, and reading them before pricing avoids the commonest dispute.

Forestry's third party exposure is occasional and serious, and it concentrates where a plantation meets something else.

Felling within reach of a public road, a railway, a footpath, a building, a fence or an overhead line is a different operation from felling in the middle of a block. A stem onto a carriageway is a road traffic incident. A stem into a conductor is an outage and a potentially fatal electrical event. A tree onto a walker on a forest path, or a public right of way nobody closed, is an injury claim. Members of the public walk into working forestry sites with surprising frequency because a plantation does not look like a construction site.

So the controls are the ones a highways or utilities contractor would recognise. Identification of everything within two tree lengths before starting, traffic management where a road is in range rather than a lookout, contact with the network operator and an isolation or a shutdown where a line is in range, signing and closure of paths with physical barriers rather than notices, and banksmen where the public can approach. Keep the records, because a stem on a road is investigated and the question is what was in place.

Remoteness and the retained crop are the two questions. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.