That Friday in Flagstaff when the elm split clean down the middle

We had a 60 foot elm that looked fine from the street, but I climbed up and saw a dark vertical crack running through the co-dominant stems, so I called the crew to set up rigging lines before the afternoon wind hit. By 3pm the whole crown peeled apart like a zipper and dropped a 4 foot section right onto the sidewalk where a school bus had just passed, and my ground guy yelled "that was close" as the dust settled. Any of you had a tree fail that fast after you spotted a warning sign but still didn't fully shut down the job?

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west.richard25d ago

Read a report from Cornell last winter about how elms with included bark fail way faster than people expect. They studied like 40 failures and found most had visible cracks that got ignored because the tree looked okay from the ground. Your story matches that exactly, the split runs up the middle and you still figure you got time. That bus passing makes my stomach drop just reading it. I had a maple do something similar back in 2019, cracked overnight and dumped a limb on my truck, no warning at all. The scary part is how quick these things go from fine to gone.