We’re excited to be featured in New Zealand Arboricultural Association’s Tree Matters magazine!

Their spring issue features a fantastic 4-page spread, with some brilliant examples of our work — including when we removed five mature pohutukawa trees from along Princes Wharf as part of the Downtown Transformation project.

The trees were 30-40 years old and ranged between 8-10m tall, with root balls around 3.8m wide by 60cm deep.To add to the challenge, at some point the trees had large amounts of concrete poured around their base, constricting their growth. This needed to be carefully broken away with jackhammers. Complicating things further, there were large services running through the concrete and tree roots — both power and gas — that would be catastrophic if hit.

“This was definitely a job for our Dry X,” says our operations manager, Mike Dargaville. “The stakes were too high to have a digger doing the work, and flooding the hole with water with hydro-excavation wasn’t an option with the services running through the job.”

HydroVac operators are currently using the same air excavation technology on a City Rail Link (CRL) job, removing old mature trees from the city centre – many of which run over live wires and pipes.

Download the article as a PDF HERE