🚀 go-pugleaf

"Curt" <cje@hevanet.com> wrote in message 
news:12cfl7vlo9ut899@corp.supernews.com...

> No one was ever hurt by cutting a spiked tree, AFAIK.

I've heard that too.  My father-in-law says he medevaced somebody one time 
(died in his arms in the helicopter) said to have hit a spike, but, no 
further word ever came of it.

Claiming to hit a tree spike is a good way for a logging operator to avoid 
insurance liability for some other cause.   Considering that we have logging 
companies in Oregon with felony conviction for price fixing and timber 
theft, and I know people hired by the logging industry to terrorize 
environmentalists up to and including with firearms, and we have places such 
as Warner Creek where the forest was deliberately torched so it could be 
logged at fire-sale auction prices...

...and we have said felon logging owners claiming that electric fence 
insulators that grew into the bark of young trees are "tree spikes", it's 
likely as not.  Anyway, Wikipedia has a brief entry on it that contains 
this:

---
In 1987, California mill worker George Alexander was seriously injured when 
the bandsaw he was operating was shattered by a tree spike. While both the 
County sheriff and Alexander's employers, Louisiana-Pacific, blamed 
environmentalists for the spiking, when Earth First! activist Judi Bari 
obtained the sheriff's files on the incident some years later, she 
discovered that one of the suspects for the spiking was Bill Ervin, a 50 
year old property-owner, unconnected with Earth First. While Ervin freely 
admitted spiking trees on his own land to prevent Louisiana-Pacific from 
taking timber on his side of the property line, he was never charged with 
spiking the tree that injured Alexande
--

Judi Bari died of cancer awhile back, but the her story is the stuff of 
movies like Silkwood.    Wikipedia:

"In 2002, a jury in their federal civil lawsuit exonerated Bari and Cherney 
by ordering four FBI agents and three Oakland Police officers to pay a total 
of $4.4 million to Cherney and to Bari's estate for violation of their First 
Amendment rights to freedom of speech and for false arrest and unlawful 
search and seizure."

-c