Protecting Your Home or Business from Storm Damage

12/19/2017 (Permalink)

Snow isn’t the only thing leaving its mark on our homes this time of year. It may not be springtime yet, but storms are still whipping through cities causing power outages and home damage. According to the National Storm Damage Center (NSDC), damage caused by trees during severe weather, account for over $1 billion in property damage. Broken limbs or trees can cause mass amounts of damage to your property if they make contact. Such damage can be done to roofing, siding, windows and even structure to the home, causing lots of expensive repairs. Unfortunately there is no way to stop the unpredictable weather, but there are ways to prevent damage from happening to your home. 

Assessing your tree

The National Storm Damage Center insists on trying to keep trees healthy and surviving as long as they’re not posing an immediate threat, but how do we know if the tree is ready to be taken down or not? There are different ways that a tree can be assessed to give you a better answer to that question.

·      Broken limbs – the larger amount of large limbs that are broken on a tree, the less likely it is to survive or recover from storm damage. This tree is unfortunately probably ready to be taken down.

·      Amount of limbs broken – A tree showing more than 50% of it’s limbs broken or damaged means that it will most likely have a difficult time producing leaves in the upcoming season, therefor making it harder for it to survive.

·      Leader branch – Is the upward-trending branch at the top of the tree broken? Without this branch being intact, it is likely that the tree’s growth will be stunted, making it less likely to survive.

·      Location – Last, but not least is location. Saving trees is important for our environment, but keeping lives safe is obviously more important to us. The biggest decision on whether to keep a tree in your yard or not is purely the location of the tree. Is it in a location that could cause damage or injury to your home, car or family if it were to break? If so, it is better to be safe than sorry and get it removed before a storm comes through.