Emergency Storm Damage Cleanup In St. George, Ontario

Most Emergency Storm Damage Cleanup Here Happens In Autumn

Most people expect emergency storm damage cleanup to follow the dramatic weather. Around this village it mostly follows the dull weather.

The heavy silt and clay under St. George holds water. After several weeks of autumn rain the ground is saturated and the shallow root plate this soil produces is sitting in something closer to a slurry than a soil. It has not frozen yet, so nothing is locked in place.

A wind that would have done nothing in July then tips the entire plate. The tree goes over with the root ball attached and a crater where it stood, rather than snapping partway up. That is the classic St. George failure and it is a November event, not a January one.

Ice brings the other kind of emergency storm damage cleanup, and it works differently — it coats every twig, multiplies what the crown weighs, and does it silently overnight. Wide crowns and included unions go first.

How The Calls Get Ordered

After a bad night more calls arrive than any crew can attend, so they are worked by risk rather than by who rang first.

Live services first, then anything bearing on a room somebody sleeps in, then whatever is sealing the only exit. Outbuildings, fencing and vehicles follow, together with hangers above a path. A trunk flat on open grass, threatening nothing more, can hold. It remains emergency storm damage cleanup, but nobody gains from doing it by torchlight.

Tension Is What Makes Emergency Storm Damage Cleanup Dangerous

A fallen tree is almost never at rest. It is bent, sprung, pinned, or holding the weight of something else.

Cut one in the wrong order and all of that releases at once. This is how people get badly hurt with saws they own but use twice a year, and it is the single reason to leave a storm-thrown tree alone until somebody who does it for a living has looked at it.

The other reason is insurance. Photograph everything from several angles before anything moves, because it cannot be reconstructed afterwards and your insurer will want it.

What Happens Afterwards

Making it safe and tidying it up are two separate stages, and they are often on different days. Sectioning a tree clear of a roof, letting a loaded trunk down safely, or bringing a hanger out so a garden becomes usable again — that is stage one.

Then the emergency storm damage cleanup finishes it: brush chipped, trunk cut down and stacked or removed, drive cleared, ground raked. Where a tree came off a building we can leave the damaged section in place for the adjuster and take everything else.

On this soil there is a last consideration. A crater left by a tipped plate wants backfilling and compacting properly, not just turf thrown over it, or it settles into a hollow that holds water all winter.