The death of a 41-year-old man who was killed while felling a tree in Portrane, Co Dublin has been described at an inquest as an “unspeakable tragedy”.
Dublin District Coroner’s Court heard on Monday that William Kenny, who had been felling trees for more than 20 years, died almost instantly on February 11th, 2023.
Brendan McGahern, who was felling the tree with Mr Kenny on the day of his death, said the pair cut and felled trees alongside their primary jobs in construction and the planned operation was a “textbook” felling.
The inquest heard how the men planned appropriately for a controlled fall of a pine tree, which Mr McGahern described as a “no-brainer”.
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They had removed the weight from one side of the tree so that it would fall away from the customer’s house.
Despite cutting a wedge out of the back of the tree, and then hammering in plastic wedges to coax the tree to fall, it did not move, Mr McGahern said.
“The behaviour of it was unprecedented, I’ve never in my life seen a tree behave the way it did,” he said.
“We then heard a crack of it moving, it was a sharp crack. It didn’t fall into the wedge, it came down vertically off the stump. We both ran, I ran to the left and William ran towards the house.”
Mr McGahern said he fell after being hit by a part of the tree as it came down but he was back on his feet again in a few seconds. He then saw Mr Kenny “pinned” under the tree’s trunk, which was about 1m in width.
Emergency services arrived but Mr Kenny was pronounced dead at the scene.
“We’ve conducted the same thing numerous times,” Mr McGahern said, adding that the weather was ideal and they had all of the required equipment to hand. “It wasn’t our first rodeo.”
In a written statement, Garda Aidan Barry of Santry Garda station said it appeared as though the large tree slipped off the stump, spun around and fell backwards. “There were no obvious obstructions that would have hindered his escape. The speed and weight of the falling tree caused Mr Kenny to lose his life,” he said.
A postmortem examination found that Mr Kenny died from traumatic cranial injuries, secondary to blunt force trauma.
Coroner Dr Clare Keane told family members that his death would have been almost “instantaneous”, before returning a verdict of accidental death.
“An unspeakable tragedy, for a task that had been done so many times in what sounded like perfect weather conditions,” she said.
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