Tree felling in Kempton Park: under the flight path, above the problem

Local tree felling guide

Living near OR Tambo has its rhythms. You stop noticing the planes within a few months, the way you stop noticing the neighbour’s dog, the train line, the school bell. What you don’t stop noticing is the tree that’s been growing since you moved in and is now large enough to appear on a cautious pilot’s instrument check. Tall trees, airport proximity and Kempton Park go together more often than most people think about, and we get called out here often enough to have strong opinions on the best way to bring them down.

Tree Hugger Collective works across Kempton Park and the surrounding East Rand, Birchleigh, Glen Marais, Bonaero Park, Norkem Park, Kempton Park CBD and surrounds. We do the full range: full removals, stump grinding, pruning, storm cleanup. This is what to know before you call.

Trees, heights and living near OR Tambo

There’s a healthy stock of large trees in Kempton Park’s older residential areas, gum trees planted in rows as windbreaks decades ago, poplars that grew fast in wet summers and didn’t stop, old oaks along estate boundaries that were never going to stay at a manageable height. The flight path question is occasionally real: trees that approach certain heights near the airport do attract airport authority attention, though in practice most suburban trees would need to be genuinely enormous and in a very specific corridor to trigger formal concern. If you have a question about a particular tree’s height relative to the airport, the relevant authority is ATNS (Air Traffic and Navigation Services) and your municipality, we can give you our assessment on-site but the official determination is theirs.

What’s much more practically relevant is what large trees near OR Tambo do to your property. The orographic effect, the local wind pattern created by the open expanses of the airport’s cleared land, pushes some very strong gusts through adjacent residential areas during Highveld storm season. Trees that might handle a standard suburban summer can take serious punishment from the channelled wind that rolls off the airport’s perimeter during a big cell. Structurally weak trees, trees with old root damage, trees with decay at the base, these fail here at a higher rate than comparable trees further away from large open ground.

We notice this in our callout patterns. Kempton Park features prominently in our storm-damage workload.

Safe felling in tight suburban plots

Kempton Park’s older residential areas, Birchleigh, Glen Marais, the original township-era streets of Kempton Park itself, have the characteristic small-to-moderate plot sizes of Rand suburbs built for mine workers and airport employees in the mid-twentieth century. The gardens aren’t enormous, and the trees that have grown in them haven’t consulted the plot sizes. You end up with tall gum trees planted one metre from the boundary wall, their root systems fighting with the foundations and the drains, their crowns hanging over two or three properties at once.

This is exactly the situation where sectional dismantling earns its keep. We don’t fell these trees whole, there’s nowhere for them to go. A climber works up into the crown and brings the tree down piece by piece: limbs removed and lowered on ropes, then the trunk taken in sections from the top, each piece landing in the designated drop zone with no swing, no surprise, no neighbour’s roof involved. For trees with very large upper sections that can’t be lowered safely by rope, rigging equipment or a mobile platform lets us control the weight from outside the drop zone.

The access challenge in these older suburbs is real: narrow gates, concrete driveways with vehicles, small gardens with established planting. We come to the site before we quote, look at the access, and plan the job before we start, not while we’re standing there with the chainsaw running.

Stumps and storm cleanup

After a standard removal the stump stays, and in Kempton Park’s garden soils, often a mix of dark clay and the red-brown disturbed earth common around the East Rand, a stump left untreated produces shoots and suckers vigorously, especially from gum and poplar stumps. Our grinder takes the stump down to 150-300 mm below surface level, removing the material that the root system would otherwise continue feeding. The grindings are chipped wood and fine material, good mulch if you want to keep it or cleared away if you don’t.

Storm cleanup in this suburb tends to come in waves, a big weather event comes through, the phone starts the next morning, and we’re working through a queue of split and fallen trees across the area. Our 24/7 emergency line is for exactly this: when a tree has come down on your roof, blocked your driveway, or split in a way that leaves a heavy section hanging over something important, don’t wait for the queue. Call immediately and describe the situation. We triage by severity and get to the genuine hazards first.

For non-emergency post-storm work, a clean break that’s not threatening anything, a smaller limb that needs clearing, we’ll get to you within the week in most cases, sometimes faster.