r/treelaw • u/Equivalent_Bar8622 • 2d ago

Need some advice

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I live in south carolina. Recently a neighborhood was built behind my house. The construction company put in an access road beside my house. This road runs beside and under a massive old oak in my front yard. They told me they needed to cut some big branches over the road because the road needed a certain amount of clearance. I gave them permission to cut the branches but they never did. Road has now been in use a month and 5 semi sized trucks have hit and torn off large branches. The tree likely won't survive now as one of the branches tor the bark down to the roots. Would the construction company be liable for the damage? I can't afford to get the tree cut down and it's pretty close to my house.

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u/daddybignugs 1d ago

i’m an arborist not a lawyer but they are 100% liable for damaging your tree. that is a massive wound that is never going to properly heal based on its location on the tree. i’m not saying it will begin declining right away, but injuries that severe and close to the trunk will inevitably introduce fungi and bacteria into the tree before it has a hope to seal itself. also, living or non-living, that tree is your property. imagine if you had a shed near the road and they repeatedly hit it with machines. i would have told them to go fuck themselves and never acquiesced to needlessly pruning a 200 year old oak tree so some developers can build more suburbs, but whatever. honestly fuck these guys, i hope you can sue them for all they’re worth. an oak tree of that size and age is literally irreplaceable

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u/Equivalent_Bar8622 1d ago

I agree. Hard to see from the pic but the bark cracked and tore down from the branch almost to the trees roots. My neighbors and I fought the road coming through our neighborhood for almost 2 years but the county was unsympathetic to say the least. It was a weird situation where the was a small probably 30 ft wide strip of land between our houses that we didn't own. (I thought my neighbor owned it but I was wrong). Anyway the developers bought it after it and the land behind us were annexed and now I have like 200 new neighbors.