What are common forestry injuries?

Forestry is an area that many, many years ago, I used to work in myself, so I am pretty, pretty aware of foresty injuries. Not a massive amount of forestry injuries have I gone to. Again, forestry these days is a very, very safe environment. We spend a lot of time and money on protective equipment. However, when it does go wrong, and people do get injured, quite often it is a catastrophic bleed. You have got to remember, a chainsaw will take out an actual gouge of skin and bone, and they are extremely sharp. And they tend to, because they leave a gap, as they take a channel out of your leg or your arm or whatever it hits, it bleeds profusely and they do cut through skin very, very quickly. So, it is really common with chainsaw injuries to hit arteries, to have major arterial bleeds, potentially even amputations. I have been to one that took all his toes off with a chainsaw.

I have been to one that was hit in the groin with the chainsaw as it flipped and I have also had one that the chainsaw actually hit him in the face as it flipped. So we tend to have fewer accidents with forestry, but when we do have an accident it is normally catastrophic. It is normally an arterial bleed, potential amputation. Normally, a life-threatening injury. Also, we have got the trees shedding branches down onto the guy below. So, without helmets and that sort of stuff, I have had head injuries from branches falling out of trees. And I have had a couple of occasions where people have tried to use chainsaws at home that are not trained properly and actually fell the tree down on the building, on the garages or even actually on people that are pulling ropes to try and pull the trees into the garden. So, it is one of those industries wherein accidents are few and far between, but when they do happen, are normally life-threatening, quite often catastrophic and need specialist treatment as fast as possible, so yeah, it is a pretty dangerous world.