Emergency & Storm Damage Tree Service

Call now if any of this is true

A tree or limb is touching a power line, or a line is down. Do not go near it, do not try to move anything, and keep everyone well back including from puddles and fences near the wire. Call your electricity distributor and 911 first. A tree company cannot legally or safely work on a tree in contact with a live line until the utility has made it safe. Once it is de-energised or sleeved, we handle the tree.

A tree has hit the house, or is leaning on it. Get everyone out of the rooms underneath, and call. A tree resting on a roof is holding load in a way it was never designed to, and how it is taken off matters enormously. Cut in the wrong order it drops the rest of the way.

There is a fresh lean, with the ground heaved or cracked on the opposite side. That is the root plate lifting, and it means the anchorage has already partly failed. It does not recover. It will come the rest of the way, and nobody can tell you exactly when.

A limb is hung up in the canopy. This is the one people most often decide to leave, and it is genuinely dangerous. A hung limb can sit for weeks and then come down on a still afternoon with a child or a car underneath. It is a small job now and a serious incident later.

A trunk or a major fork has split. A visible fresh crack at a union means the tree is coming apart and is holding on by less than it looks.

A tree is blocking a driveway, a road or an exit. Access for you and for an ambulance is a real emergency, not an inconvenience.

What can safely wait for a normal appointment

Not everything after a storm is an emergency, and it saves you money to know the difference. Deadwood in the crown you have been meaning to sort out, a crown that has got too dense, a few small branches on the lawn, bark shed from a dead ash, or a tree you are simply unsure about can all be booked as normal work.

The test we use is straightforward: is there something valuable underneath it, and has anything about the tree changed recently. A dead limb over the back fence that has been there three years is not urgent. The same limb over the driveway after a wind event that clearly moved it is a different matter.

If you are not sure, phone and describe it, or send a photo. We will tell you honestly whether it needs us tonight or whether it can wait until next week, and we would rather tell you it can wait than sell you an emergency callout.

How we work through a storm

After a significant wind or ice event the phone does not stop, and no honest company can be everywhere at once. We triage. Trees on houses, trees on wires, blocked exits and anything over a bedroom go first. Property damage with nobody in danger goes next. Cleanup and tidy-up work follows.

That means if yours is not the worst situation on the list, we will tell you realistically when we can be there rather than promising this afternoon and not turning up. That is not the answer anybody wants during a storm, but a specific honest window is worth more than a vague reassurance, because it lets you make your own arrangements.

First visit is usually about making it safe, not making it finished. On an emergency call the aim is to get the hazard down or secured and the access open. Finishing the tree properly, grinding the stump and tidying the site is often a scheduled return once nothing is dangerous any more, which is a calmer and more sensible way to handle the tidy-up than doing it in the dark mid-storm.

Insurance claims and what to do while you wait

Most home insurance policies in Ontario cover damage a tree causes to a building or an insured structure, and are much less generous about the cost of removing a tree that fell without hitting anything. Cover varies, so the sequence that helps you is: make it safe, tell your insurer early, and document everything.

Photograph it before anything is moved, from several angles, including the base and any heaved ground. Photograph any damage to the building. Keep every invoice, ours included, and ask your insurer whether they need an assessment before work starts, because some policies do and doing it out of order can cost you the claim.

You will get a written invoice, and it can describe the hazard and the work in the detail an adjuster wants. What we will not do is tell you what your policy covers, because we have not read it and guessing would not help you.

While you are waiting: keep people and pets away from anything leaning or hung up, park cars somewhere else, stay out of the rooms under a tree that is on the roof, and do not climb up to have a look. Most serious injuries in storm aftermath happen to homeowners with a ladder and a chainsaw, working alone, on wood under tension. Storm-damaged wood is loaded in ways that are not visible and it moves violently when cut.

What it costs and where we come

An emergency call-out is a different job from the same tree booked for a Tuesday in February: out of hours, a crew pulled off other work, and higher risk in worse conditions. Ask what it will come to before we start and we will tell you. What we will not do is use an emergency as leverage to sell you work you do not need.

We are based in Bowmanville and we cover Courtice, Newcastle, Oshawa, Whitby, Orono, Newtonville, Port Perry and Scugog, Port Hope, Cobourg, Grafton, Roseneath, Millbrook, Bethany and Cavan Monaghan. Closer to the shop means faster, and Courtice, Newcastle and Bowmanville are all inside ten minutes.

Fully insured, with proof available before we start. Ask for it. Storm season is exactly when uninsured operators appear door to door with a chainsaw in the back of a pickup, and if one of them damages your house or injures himself in your garden, that becomes your problem.