Emergency Tree Service in Centerton, AR

What to do in the first ten minutes

If a tree is on your house or across your drive, do these things before anything else.

• Get everyone out of the rooms under it. A limb that is resting is still loaded and can shift when the wind changes.
• Treat every wire as live. If a limb is on a line, do not approach the tree or the puddle around it. Call the utility, then call us.
• Take photos before anything moves. Wide shots and close shots. Your insurance adjuster will want them and you cannot recreate them later.
• Do not climb up to look at the roof and do not start cutting the limb yourself. Storm-loaded wood is under tension and it does not come apart the way it looks like it will.

Then call us and describe what you see. We will tell you honestly whether this is a right-now job or a first-thing-tomorrow job.

The storms that actually cause this here

Ice. The worst nights in Centerton are freezing rain nights, not wind nights. Glaze loads limbs far past what they were grown to carry, and the failures come in waves as the load builds. Bradford pears and silver maples go first, then big overextended oak limbs.

Straight-line wind ahead of a spring line. Our shallow limestone soil holds trees fine until it is saturated. Two days of rain, then a sixty mile an hour gust front, and whole root plates lift out of the ground. That is why you so often see a tree here go over intact with the dirt still in its roots instead of snapping.

Heavy wet snow. Less common but the same physics as ice, and it catches evergreens like redcedar hardest because they hold so much surface area.

Summer downbursts. Fast, local, and hard on drought-stressed trees that have been quietly rotting at the base all season.

What we do when we get there

First thing is making the site safe: identifying what is under load, what is going to move when we cut, and what has to be roped or supported before a saw touches it. On a tree that is on a roof, we usually rig and lift pieces off rather than cutting them where they lie, because dropping a section can drive it further through the decking.

Once the hazard is off, we clear access, cut the tree down to safe height or take the rest of it out, and haul everything away. If your roof is open, we can tarp it to keep water out until a roofer can get to you, which matters more than most people realize, because water damage inside usually costs more than the hole itself.

Insurance, and what to expect on price

In most cases a homeowners policy covers tree removal when the tree hit a covered structure, and often does not when the tree simply fell in the yard. We document everything with photos and give you an itemized invoice written the way adjusters want to read it. We are happy to talk to your adjuster directly.

Emergency work costs more than scheduled work. That is a night crew, extra hands, and hazard rigging. If a tree is clearly failing but has not come down yet, a planned removal during normal hours is significantly cheaper. And a lot of the calls we take at 2 a.m. would have been prevented by a regular trimming visit in the fall.