PowerClear

Cutting a rootball out of the side of a batter slip is not a job most tree companies will look at. PowerClear does it with specially trained height access crews and a water knife, using high pressure water at up to 9000 psi to cut through roots without going near the services buried alongside them. Our water knife units are purpose built onto vacuum trucks, so the spoil gets vacuumed away in the same pass, and because it is a genuinely dangerous piece of equipment the crews wear Kevlar boots and pants along with the rest of the PPE. The same units handle root pruning, root barrier installation, stump removal and the root work under a transplant.

Campbell Brooke, an arborist and our director, established the business in 2003, and it now runs up to 100 full time staff and over 180 heavy pieces of machinery. Head office and the main depot are at Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast, with a second depot at Loganholme, and the work goes to local, state and federal government organisations and the infrastructure construction sector across South East Queensland and out to jobs anywhere in Australia. We are ISO third party certified.

Doing it all in house is the whole idea. We own and operate a timber mill and a mulch trommel, which is how 100 per cent of the by-product from our tree pruning and removals gets recycled rather than tipped. The fleet takes in chippers from 9 inch through to 30 inch, whole tree chippers, stump grinders from 27 to 60 horsepower on tyres or tracks, elevated work platforms at 12, 18, 30 and 40 metres, crane trucks, water trucks, excavators from 5 to 30 tonnes with stick rakes, mulching heads and rock hammers, posi track loaders, mega mulchers and horizontal grinders. In house mechanics keep it all turning, and every vehicle and machine is monitored through GPS Navman Wireless.

Emergency response and disaster management runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the crews who do it take their work vehicles home. They are stationed across the South East so response time is not spent driving back to a depot first, they hold Level 3 Advanced Tree Felling certification, and they turn out in 4WD utilities with light towers for night works, with 18 inch and 30 inch chippers, tandem tippers, rubber tracked excavators and skid steers with log grabs. We cleaned up Springbrook after Cyclone Debbie, and we have run wild fire emergency response and hazard reduction work on Moreton Island.

The jobs we are built for are large scale clearing and complex tree removal, anything from 46 kilometres of vegetation reduction along a corridor to one large fig that has to come out in a single piece. We lift and move mature trees through tree transplanting, which is how the transplants for the Commonwealth Games were handled, and we have relocated an Aboriginal scar tree. Our consulting arborists write tree reports and management plans and collect the site data behind them, our climbing arborists carry out the tree health care and tree planting and maintenance those reports call for, and the horticulture and landscape team finishes a site off with turfing and landscaping. Ring 07 5568 0541 or email the office, tell us the scale of what you are dealing with, and we will scope it and price it.