After the wind quits
Storm damage cleanup for Pittsburgh yards
The front moved through Tuesday night. Nothing hit the house, so nobody had to call anybody at 2am. What you woke up to instead was half the backyard on the ground, a broken leader still parked up in the canopy, and a maple that suddenly leans a few degrees more than it used to. That is the work on this page: the scheduled visit that puts the property back the way it was.
A downburst leaves more than the pile you can see
Western Pennsylvania storms mostly arrive as a downburst: a column of air that hits the ground and spreads sideways at highway speed for about ninety seconds. The pile of limbs in the yard is the obvious part, and it is honestly the easy part. What matters more is everything the wind broke but did not finish. Hangers, in trade language, are limbs that snapped clean but never made it out of the canopy. They are hooked on a crotch forty feet up, and gravity is still working on them. People call them widow-makers for the reason you would guess. They come down on a calm afternoon days later, and they do not announce themselves.
Then there are the half-failed leaders. A big vertical stem cracks at the union but stays attached by a hinge of fiber and bark, so from the driveway it looks like the tree just got a little untidy. It is holding several hundred pounds on a connection that has already partly failed. And there is the tree that is leaning now and was not leaning before, which means the root plate moved under saturated clay soil. None of those three are emergencies in the sense of somebody needing to leave the house tonight, but all three are hazards on a clock, and all three are why storm cleanup is a real service instead of a rake and a Saturday.
Storm wood is the worst wood to teach yourself on
Chris has spent 25 years in this trade, and the calls he most hates getting are the ones where a homeowner already started. Cutting storm wood is the single most dangerous saw work there is, and the reason is tension and compression. In a normal felling cut, the wood is at rest and you decide where the load goes. In storm wood, the load is already stored in the fibers. A limb bent under its own weight has one side stretched tight and the other side crushed. Cut the tight side and it whips. Cut the crushed side and the bar pinches solid, and now you are holding a running saw that is stuck in a limb that is about to move.
A trunk that snapped and caught itself on a fence is a loaded spring. A limb pinned under another limb releases the second the top piece comes off. And a hanger cannot be cut down from below by anybody who is standing below it, which is where most of the bad ones happen. Our crews read those load paths before a saw comes out, relieve the tension in stages, and rope anything that has somewhere unwanted to go. If the tree is currently on your roof or your car, or a wire is involved, that is live danger and it belongs on the emergency tree service page, not this one. Call us and say the word emergency, and the sorting happens on the phone.
The trees that stayed up still need looking at
Everybody focuses on what fell. The survivors are where the next problem lives. A tree that took the same wind and held can still be carrying a fresh crack somewhere, and the tells are small: a seam of split bark running down the trunk, a union that has opened a fraction of an inch, mushroomed bark where two stems ground against each other, or soil heaved into a low ridge on the upwind side of the base. Sawdust at the foot of a trunk after a windy night means something inside moved.
So while we are on site clearing debris, we walk the rest of the trees near the house. It costs us twenty minutes and it has caught plenty of trees that would have come down the following spring on a much worse day. Some of what we find is nothing at all, and we say that too, because talking somebody into removing a healthy tree is not how this business earns referrals. When something does need to go, you hear it plainly and you get a number for it right then.
Chipped, hauled, raked, gone
Cleanup means the property looks finished, not tidied. Debris goes through the chipper on site, brush and all, and leaves in the truck. Trunk wood gets cut down and loaded, or bucked and stacked where you want it if you burn. Ruts get graded, the lawn gets raked, and the driveway gets blown off. That is the whole one and done idea: you should not be hauling anything to a curb, and you should not be finding a stray branch in the hedge three weeks later. Photos from finished cleanups are in the gallery if you want to see what done looks like here.
What we sweep for
Hangers still hooked in the canopy, cracked unions, torn bark seams down the trunk, root plates lifted on the windward side, and dead wood the storm loosened but did not drop.
Full documentation photos for your carrier before anything moves, if a claim is in play.
Insured, PA HIC #163598, military discount. Bigger casualties often turn into full tree removal once we get a look at the damage.
“Came through did an excellent job removing a huge pine tree that was damaged in the recent storm.”
Allyson W., Google reviewSplitting up the cleanup work
You handle the paperwork side. We handle everything with weight in it.
Your part
Walk the yard from open ground and take pictures, especially of anything that fell on something. Send them over. Stay out from under the canopy until we have been there, and keep the kids and the dog out of that footprint too.
Open the claim with your carrier if the storm did damage worth claiming. Then wait for us instead of borrowing a saw.
Our part
Walk the whole property, not only the pile. Look up into every tree near the house for hangers and cracked unions, check trunks for fresh seams, and check root plates for lift. Then a written number, top to bottom, before a saw runs.
Climb and pull the hangers from above. Relieve tension in stages on anything spring-loaded. Chip, load, haul, grade, rake. Photos for your claim on the way through. Questions after go to Chris, and you can reach him here.
The cut face on the right tells the story: torn fiber, not a clean break. That is what a wind failure looks like inside.
Why the same streets call every August
Storms do not spread damage evenly around Allegheny County, and after enough seasons you learn the pattern. Ridgetop streets and open subdivisions catch the full force of a downburst because there is nothing upwind to break it. Older neighborhoods with big street trees planted at the same time lose limbs at the same time, all down one block. And the low, wet ground along the creeks holds saturated clay long after the rain, so a wind that would bother nothing in August tips whole trees over in April.
We clear storm damage across the North Hills and beyond, including Penn Hills, Moon Township, and Oakmont. Those three tell you the range of it: Penn Hills has the mature suburban canopy sitting right over rooflines, Moon Township has newer open developments where wind gets a running start, and Oakmont has old riverfront trees on ground that stays soft. Same storm, three different kinds of mess.
One honest word about scheduling. After a regional event that hits everybody at once, the phone does not stop for days, and we work the list by danger first. A hanger over a driveway beats a brush pile in a back corner every time. If you call us the morning after a big one, we will tell you a real window rather than a comfortable one, and if a neighbor’s situation is genuinely worse than yours, we will say so. Isolated damage from a storm that only clipped your street usually moves a lot faster than that.
Cleanup questions
What people ask us standing in the yard the morning after.
The storm passed and nothing hit the house. Do I still need somebody?
Look up before you answer that. If there is broken wood sitting in the canopy, a stem cracked at a union, or a lean that was not there last week, then yes, because those are still coming down and you do not get to pick when. If it is just leaves and small stuff on the ground, that is a yard-waste afternoon and we will tell you so on the phone.
Do you haul everything away or just cut it up?
Everything goes. Brush runs through the chipper on site and rides out in the truck, trunk wood gets loaded, and the ground gets raked and graded where machines traveled. If you burn or mill, say so and we will buck and stack rounds wherever you want them instead.
Can you help with my insurance claim?
We photograph the damage before we touch anything, note what was struck and how, and hand that over for your file. Adjusters want to see the condition as it was found, so it helps to call us before the pile moves. What gets covered is your carrier’s call, but we make sure you are not arguing from memory.
My tree lost a big limb but looks fine otherwise. Does it survive?
Often yes. It depends on how much canopy is gone, whether the break tore bark down the trunk, and whether the remaining structure is balanced. We look for seams, cracked unions, and torn root plates while we are there, and we tell you straight whether it is a keeper worth pruning or a tree that is going to fail on you next season.
How soon can you get out after a big storm?
Depends entirely on how wide the storm was. Damage on one street usually means a day or two. A front that flattened trees across the whole county means we run the list by danger and you may wait longer, and we will give you an honest window on the phone instead of a number that sounds good.
What does storm cleanup run?
It comes down to how much wood is down, how much is still hung up overhead, and whether a truck can reach it. That is why we walk the property instead of guessing over the phone. Chris looks at all of it and hands you an up-front number in writing, and it covers hauling too. Set up the walk-around and you will have it quickly.
Get the yard back before the next front
One visit clears the ground, pulls what is hanging, and hauls all of it off your property. Chris walks it, you get a number in writing, and then it is done. In sawdust we trust.