That time a structural engineer told me to stop cabling old oaks and I lost a big client

A property owner in Fairfax had a 100 year old red oak with a split crotch, I'd been cabling it every 4 years like my old boss taught me. Then an engineer doing a patio survey walked by and told the client the cable was actually pulling the branch apart because the anchor point was too low, which I'd never heard before. He showed me the math, I checked it against a few other trees, and the guy was right, my cables were acting like a lever in wind. Client dropped me over it, but honestly I've changed my whole rigging approach since then. Anyone else run into a situation where standard practice turned out to be counterproductive in certain species or angles? Trying to figure out if I should push back on the textbook method more often or if that engineer was just a fluke.

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burns.fiona17d ago

That engineer's math only works if the wind hits the tree exactly like his model, and I've seen plenty of 100 year old oaks hold cables fine with low anchors for decades, so your old boss's method likely kept that tree alive longer than any fancy calculation would have.