Read the leaner before the saw comes out
A chinook wind or a heavy wet spring snow leaves trees leaning where they never grew. A leaner resting on a neighbor tree or a roof is not standing on its roots anymore. It is a loaded spring. The trunk, the limbs holding it up, and the wood it rests on are all carrying force in directions nobody can see from the driveway. Cut the wrong fiber and that force releases all at once, toward the saw and the man holding it.
The read comes first. Which way the load wants to move, what is holding it, what lets go when the first cut opens. A climber who works storm wood makes that read from a rope in a sound tree next door, not from under the lean. Each cut is planned so the wood shifts away from him and away from whatever it is resting on. If your crew is standing around a leaner debating where to start, that debate is the sign the job belongs to a climber.
Snapped tops and hung limbs
The wind snaps a leader and the top does not always come down. It hangs in the canopy, caught on a few small branches, over the driveway or the service drop or the spot where your groundman stacks brush. A hung limb can sit there for a week or let go the next time the breeze moves it. Nobody can tell which from the ground. Every hour it stays up there, it is a load with no rigging on it over a work area.
A climber puts the rigging on before anything moves. He gets above or beside the hanger, ties it off to a sound point, and only then makes the cut that frees it. The piece swings onto the rope instead of falling, and the ground crew lowers it to a clear spot at whatever speed they choose. A snapped top comes down the same way, cut into lengths the rope can hold. Controlled from the first cut to the ground, not dropped and hoped for.
The trouble with pulling from the ground
Pulling a hanger down with a throwline or a truck feels like the safe play because nobody leaves the ground. The problem is that a pull is a guess. Nobody knows what is actually holding the piece, so nobody knows what direction it takes when it lets go. It can roll off its catch and fall somewhere else entirely. It can whip back along the line toward the man pulling it. It can shake the whole broken top loose and bring that down too.
Rigged work removes the guess. The piece is tied before it is free, so the release point and the landing spot are chosen, not discovered. That is the whole difference. A pull spends its control before the wood moves and has none left after. A rope set from above keeps control through the entire ride down. When the hanger is over a roof, a line, or a spot your crew has to keep working under, guessing is the expensive option.
When every crew in town is buried
After a big blow the phone does not stop. Every tree company in town is slammed at the same time, and the jobs that pile up are exactly the ones with hazards aloft. Your crew can move brush and buck downed trunks all day, but each hung limb and loaded leaner stalls the schedule until someone qualified goes up. If your climber is the bottleneck, storm week is when it shows.
A contract climber for the day breaks that bottleneck. He shows up, ropes in on the hazard climbs, and your crew runs the ground work it already knows while the technical pieces come down on rigging. One flat day rate, no new hire, no sending a groundman up under pressure. The dangerous jobs come off the board while the rest of the schedule keeps moving. When storm work stacks up, the fastest way through it is a climber who slots into the crew you already have.