Ice, Ice, Maybe?

While everyone is talking about how cold it’s getting this season, it can still be easy to forget how much winter weather can pose a serious danger to you and your property. It’s easy to assume the road hazards and electrical outages that heavy snowfall and ice can cause will be the worst of it, but damage can come from a source you weren’t expecting at home—trees.

Dead trees or dangerous limbs in the midst of an ice storm can easily go from something that “you can take care of soon” to a life changing risk. Did you know that one-half inch of ice on something as small as a power line can add as much as 500 lbs on a single span? An average sized branch of a tree in the same conditions can gain almost 30 times its weight! Expand that to a an already dying tree with a compromised root system and the damage can be catastrophic for a homeowner.

However, damage from weather based tree fall is something that can be easily mitigated by early risk assessment and pre-emptive trimming or felling in a safe manner.

Prevention of damage and preventing misfortune is one of the best parts of our work at Donegan’s Tree Service. We strive to inform and help our clients and potential clients to the best of our ability during these quickly changing weather conditions and we hope to help you as the winter season progresses. You could gamble on whether the ice would be too much for your tree, but having one of Donegan’s Tree Service’s certified Arborist/Assessors give you the peace of mind before you have a problem seems like a much safer bet!