A tree came down. What to do in the first hour

First: is anything touching a wire

This is the only question that comes before every other question. If a tree or a limb is touching a power line, or a line is down, treat the whole area as live.

Stay well back, and keep everyone else back, including from puddles, wet ground and metal fences anywhere near the wire, because electricity travels through all of them. Do not try to move the branch. Do not drive over a downed line. Call your electricity distributor and 911 first.

No tree company can legally or safely work on a tree in contact with a live line until the utility has de-energised or sleeved it. Anyone who offers to is telling you something important about how they work. Once it is made safe, the tree is our job.

Then: is the building involved, and is anyone under it

If a tree is on the house or resting against it, get everyone out of the rooms underneath and stay out of them. A tree lying on a roof is holding load in a way the roof was never designed for, and the order it gets cut in matters enormously. Cut in the wrong sequence and the rest of it comes down.

If it has hit the house and you can smell gas, or there is any sign of damage to a gas line or the meter, leave the building and call the gas utility from outside.

If a tree or a large limb is blocking your driveway, an exit, or the road, that counts as urgent even with no damage to anything, because access for you and for an ambulance is not a convenience.

What is an emergency and what is not

Call now: anything touching a wire, a tree on or against the building, a fresh lean with the ground heaved or cracked on the opposite side, a visible split at a trunk or a major fork, a limb hung up in the canopy, or anything blocking access.

The hung limb deserves its own mention, because it is the one people most reliably decide to leave. A limb caught up in a crown can sit there for a fortnight and then come down on a completely still afternoon with somebody or a car underneath. It is a small job now. It is a serious incident later.

The fresh lean is the other one. If a tree is leaning more than it was, and the soil on the far side from the lean is lifted, cracked or domed, the root plate has already partly failed. That does not recover. It will come the rest of the way and nobody can tell you when.

Can wait for a normal appointment: small branches on the lawn, deadwood you had been meaning to deal with anyway, bark shed from a tree that was already dead, a crown that has got too dense, and anything you are simply unsure about.

If you cannot tell which category you are in, phone and describe it, or send a photo. We would far rather tell you it can wait until next week than sell you an emergency call-out. See the emergency service page for how we work through a storm.

The insurance sequence, in the right order

Do these in this order, because doing them out of order is how people lose money.

1. Make it safe. Nothing about a claim is worth standing under a damaged tree for.

2. Photograph everything before anything is moved. Several angles, wide and close. Include the base of the tree and any heaved or cracked ground, the damage to the building, and anything inside that got wet or broken. Photographs taken after the tree is cut up are worth far less.

3. Call your insurer early and ask one specific question: do they need to assess the damage before work starts. Some policies require it, and starting first can affect what you recover. Ask it explicitly rather than assuming.

4. Keep every invoice, ours included, plus receipts for anything you buy to protect the property in the meantime, like a tarp.

Broadly, home policies in Ontario tend to be more forthcoming about damage a tree does to an insured building than about the cost of removing a tree that fell without hitting anything. But cover varies a great deal, and we have not read your policy, so we will not tell you what it covers. You will get a written invoice, with the hazard and the work described in the detail an adjuster wants.

Why not to cut it up yourself

Every year the serious injuries after a storm happen in a predictable way: a homeowner, working alone, with a ladder and a chainsaw, on wood that is under tension.

That last part is the whole problem. A fallen tree is not a log lying still. It is loaded, often in several directions at once, by its own weight, by the root plate still partly attached, by branches bent underneath it and by whatever it is resting against. None of that is visible. When you cut into it, it releases, and it moves fast and in a direction you did not predict. A trunk can roll, a bent limb can spring, and the whole tree can shift and trap the saw or you.

A tree resting on a building is worse again, because the load is being carried by the structure and the cutting order determines where it goes when you release it.

While you are waiting: keep people and pets away from anything leaning or hung up, move cars off the driveway, stay out of the rooms under a tree that is on the roof, and do not climb up for a better look.

What happens on the first visit

On an emergency call the aim is usually to make it safe and get access open, not to finish the tree. That means getting the hazard down or secured, clearing what is blocking the driveway or the road, and making the building safe to be in.

Finishing the tree properly, dealing with whatever else the storm has loosened, grinding the stump and tidying the site is often a scheduled return once nothing is dangerous any more. That is a calmer way to do the tidy-up than in the dark with the wind still blowing.

It is also worth having the rest of the trees looked at while we are there. A storm that took one tree has usually tested the others, and the morning after is when a crown's weak points are easiest to read: fresh cracks, new leans, limbs that have dropped but not fallen.

One last thing. Storm season is when uninsured operators appear door to door with a chainsaw in a pickup. Ask any contractor for proof of insurance before they start. If somebody damages your house or injures himself in your garden without it, that becomes your problem.