Which Trees Fail First — A Mid-South Storm Prep Guide

The species that fail first

Not all trees are equally likely to end up on your roof. Ranked roughly by how often we cut them off houses:

The pre-season walk

Do this once a year, ideally in late winter with the leaves off. Walk your property and look at every tree within striking distance of a structure.

At the base

• Mushrooms or shelf fungus at the root flare — decay in the buttress roots. Serious.
• Soil cracked, mounded or lifted on the side opposite a lean — the root plate is moving. Very serious.
• A trunk that enters the ground straight with no flare — buried too deep.
• Cut, paved-over or trenched roots on any side.

On the trunk

• Vertical cracks or seams.
• Cavities, hollows, or wood you can push a screwdriver into.
• Bark missing in patches — on an oak, think hypoxylon.
• Sap or frass running from a hole.

Up in the canopy

• Included bark at the main fork — where two stems press together with a seam rather than a rounded branch collar. This is the single most common failure point on a mature Mid-South shade tree.
• Dead limbs, especially large ones.
• Hangers — broken branches lodged in the canopy from the last storm.
• Whole dead side or thinning that is worse at the top.
• Limbs resting on the roof or rubbing the siding.

What to actually do about it

1. Take out the deadwood. Dead limbs are what comes down first, and they come down in ordinary weather, not just storms.
2. Reduce end weight on overextended limbs. Shortening a long lever arm dramatically cuts the load at the attachment point. This is the highest-value storm pruning there is.
3. Cable weak unions that are worth saving — see cabling & bracing.
4. Clear the roof by at least six to eight feet where you can.
5. Remove the ones that are going to fail. A hazardous tree taken down on a Tuesday in February costs a fraction of the same tree removed at 2 a.m. off your roof — with no deductible and no hole in your ceiling.
6. Do not top anything. Topping makes storm failure more likely, not less. See trimming & pruning.

Ice is its own category

Freezing rain loads a canopy with hundreds of pounds of ice in a few hours, and unlike wind it loads every branch evenly and all at once. The Mid-South's big ice events break whole neighborhoods rather than individual trees.

Two things worth knowing:

• Do not knock ice off branches. Frozen wood is brittle; you will break what you are trying to save.
• Do not cut loaded limbs yourself. A bent, ice-loaded branch is a spring holding enormous stored energy. When it releases it does so violently and in a direction you did not choose. This is how people get badly hurt after ice storms.

Most bent trees stand back up on their own once the ice melts. Wait before you decide anything.

When it is coming

Move the cars out from under the trees. Bring in the loose yard furniture. Know where your utility's outage number is. And if you have been putting off a tree you already know is bad — that is the week it stops being a maintenance decision.