Ironwood removed a very large spruce tree from between my house and my neighbors house in January 2021. The tree was on my neighbor's property and she hired them and paid them. She provided me a copy of their liability insurance contract before the work was done. It took them 3 days to take down the tree and then an additional day to chip out the stump. During that time the tree company parked in front of my house and staged the removal using my front yard ,doing damage to my grass when they dragged the large tree stump pieces over my property, and spraying chipper dust all over my house and windows. I was trying to be a good neighbor so I said nothing, although they could have easily parked in front of my neighbor's house and done all their removal using her front yard instead of mine. I have a brick wall between our homes. In removing the top 25-30 feet of the tree, with all branches attached, they pulled it over the top of my brick wall and dropped it onto the brick wall and did a significant amount of damage to the brick wall. They could have avoided this by just taking the tree across my neighbor's front yard, not mine. I video taped 9 minutes of this disaster. The tree landed on the corner of my brick wall and wrapped itself around my oak tree in front of my wall as they continued to pull the tree towards the street. After I yelled at them to stop pulling as I thought they were going to destroy my oak tree, they did. The top of the tree was hooked on the corner of my brick wall and was being pulled by the pully in the street. The resulting pressure caused the wall to crack in numerous places. Ironwood then cut the branches off of the spruce and removed the large stump from my wall and from around my oak tree. All this is part of the 9 minute video I took. The video clearly shows no cracks in the east side of my brick wall before they dropped this @1000 lb tree on my wall. A photo 10 minutes later shows a clear crack in the east wall. A crack in the front part of the wall was made bigger by the impact. The top of the wall, the north side of the wall, the east side of the wall, all had new cracks just where the large tree fell on it.
I called Daryl, who runs Ironwood I am told, and he came out to view the damage. He told me he was in charge. I thought, as I had a video of this disaster and many pictures showing the damage, that he would be receptive to looking at the video and accepting responsibility for the damage, as the video clearly shows the large tree piece being dropped onto my brick wall, wrapping itself around my wall and being hung up in my oak tree. HE REFUSED TO LOOK AT THE VIDEO, as he said it was not necessary as Ironwood was not liable. He made it clear that he believed the cracks were there from some other events, and that he was not responsible and he even looked at a crack in my house wall, 15 feet away and asked me if I was going to blame him for that crack too, which of couse I did not and had not. He pulled some mortar out of one of the cracks and stated that because it was not white, that the crack was old. I explained that I had colored the mortar to match the house mortar when I built the wall and it had never been white. He ignored that obvious explanation. He treated me like a stupid old woman. He suggested that we have Tom Martino look at this. Ironwood is recommended on Mr. Martino's website which I think Ironwood pays for, but I'm not sure. Certainly as this was clearly Ironwood's fault, I was not going to use Mr. Martino to mediate this. He left and I could not believe he had simply denied liability especially since I had it all on video, and I felt totally disrespected.
I contacted Ironwood's insurance company and after I sent pictures from the video and other pictures I had taken, showing the very large tree piece directly above my wall and that there was no crack before it slammed into my wall, and the crack in the brick taken in a photo 10 minutes later, and explained what had happened, they settled with me and paid me enough to fix my wall. Luckily Ironwood has a $1000 deductible I was told, so they are out of pocket that amount at least, I hope. The actual guys who took down the tree - except for their foreman - were really nice guys. Daryl was a jerk to me and had I not had the video, it would have been he says/she says and I would have been out lots of $$$$ unless I sued them and won at trial. I would NEVER use this company. One star is too much. read more