Death of a tree, homestead update

This December will make two full years since I bought this place.
Many things have changed, with much money spent. In all this time, both of the LARGE Oak trees in the front had dropped dead rotten limbs, for the most part with out any damage except for gouging holes in the yard, but once one fell onto the porch roof.
Looking up at this tree, knowing what the weather in Georgia USA can be like, I worried.
The tree above is the larger of the two, with several large living limbs and 2 dead ones extending towards the house.
So I bit the bullet and decided to be pre-emptive and have those limbs cut, with a healthy limb on the opposite side cut to balance.
Then the tree would be given a $500 treatment of salt and seaweed inserted into the soil around the drip edge.
Another dead tree out back was part of the deal, and I got the invoice.
So nervously walking around and looking up at the Oak, I began to obsess on the black rot and some spots I could see around the trunk.

Growing up as I did in South Georgia in the woods, I have seen and talked with others who work in trees, to know that almost all large old Oak trees are hollow near the base, and if they have that kind of black rot, it is a bad sign.
The spots in my personal experience were holes left weeping sap where an insect had laid an egg, the hatched, matured and ate its way out. You could stick your little finger in them.
So I switched tracks, and rather than doing the trim and possibly still have damage or later having to remove the tree, I decided to go ahead and remove this monster.

I just now got the above image of me standing on the stump.
I am rather heartbroken, as there was NO HOLLOWNESS, no disease that I could see.
Pruning would almost surely have been better. The price in the end was the same.

↑This is a short video (which I sped up more) just to show how tall the tree was↑

And so it began. There was an old telephone line to the house that had to be removed so the crane could get closer

So you see Gill (Rafael Flores) was in the bucket doing all the Saw work

I asked that some of the limbs that were not TOO terribly large be set aside in my driveway for firewood.
I hope to have a firepit before real cold weather gets here, and I have friends with fireplaces.

I ended up with this much firewood, just a FRACTION of the wood that went to the landfill

Here is another 'fast motion' video of some of the activity

I captured some of it from a completely different angle.
This is from the remote video cam mounted on the other tree

So even where there was clear damage in a large upper limb

There was no rot on the inside. 😢 I feel such a loss
When I think of the planks, wide boards, outdoor seating etc etc I could have gotten from that last HUGE trunk, my heart aches at the missed opportunity

"Death of a Tree"

^by
Jerry E Smith
©09/16/2022
^{All images are original, taken with a variety of devices I own}