I worked very briefly for a local tree service. On a large tree which could go the wrong way there would be one person cutting and two of us holding it with a long pick pole. As long as he read the tree right that worked well; yet I always wondered what would happen that one time that the tree had different ideas.
We were clearing a 13 mile long phone line alongside the road from Greeneville to Kokadjo ME, it hadn't been done for a while and there were multiple trees down on the line. One big tree had the wire down on the ground, so the foreman told me to hold the line so that it wouldn't hit him when the pressure released. I was just a dumb rookie so I obliged. One second I was standing there holding the line as he cut it; the next I was dangling 13 feet of the ground hanging on for dear life, with the foreman screaming at me.
I worked for that company 3 weeks, besides the above incident we also set a pole on a major transmission line on fire, and cleared about 1/2 mile of roadside for a power line to a new subdivision, which turned out to be on private property. (I wondered why the poles were getting set inside the pins.) The day I left the landowner was talking about a significant lawsuit.