Storm damage: what to do in the first hour, and what to leave alone

It usually happens overnight. You open the curtains and there is a limb across the drive, or the whole tree is lying over the fence and into next door, and the first instinct is to get out there with a saw and start making it smaller.

Some of that is fine. Some of it is genuinely how people get killed in the week after a storm. The difference is not obvious, so it is worth knowing before you are standing in it.

First: look up, then look for wires

Before touching anything, walk back far enough to see the whole tree and look for material still in the crown. A snapped limb caught in the branches above is under load in directions you cannot see and comes down when something moves. That includes when somebody cuts the thing it is resting on.

Then find the service drop to the house and the road wires. Assume any line touching a tree is live, keep well away from it, and call the utility rather than us. No tree company should be working on a tree in contact with a live conductor.

What is fine to deal with yourself

Small material lying flat on the ground, nothing above it, nothing under tension. Twigs and brush. Clearing a path from the door. If you are dragging things rather than cutting them, you are almost certainly fine.

What to leave

• Anything still hung up in the crown.
• Anything touching a wire, at any distance, at all.
• A trunk resting on a fence, a shed or a car, because it is holding weight and will move when it is cut.
• Any limb bent and pinned under something, which is a spring under several hundred pounds of load.
• Anything you would need a ladder for. Chainsaws and ladders are the classic combination in the emergency room statistics.

A trunk lying across the ground looks inert and often is not. If it is resting on two high points with a span between them, it is under bending load, and cutting it in the middle can pinch the bar, roll the trunk, or spring the ends. That is a job for somebody who does it every week.

Then take photographs

Before anything is moved, photograph it from several angles, including anything it landed on. If there is an insurance claim, that is the evidence, and it is much harder to reconstruct once a crew has cleared the site.

What happens when you call

The phone here is answered around the clock, which in a bad week across Berks County genuinely means overnight. Storm work jumps the schedule ahead of the pruning that was booked for that day, because everybody who had booked pruning understands why.

The order on site is the same every time: whatever is under load or over a building first, then anything blocking access, then the ground debris, then the clean-up. If the damage has crossed a property line, say so on the phone. A customer last season had storm debris in his own yard and in his neighbor's, and from his first call to both properties being clear was under a week in the middle of the worst of it.

And if it can wait until daylight without anything else falling, it usually should. Nobody does their best rigging under a headlamp.