Is a broken limb hanging in a tree an emergency?
Yes, when it hangs over something people use. A broken limb or snapped top caught in the crown above a roof, a porch or front door, a drive, a walkway or a power line is a job for emergency tree service in Hot Springs, even with nothing broken yet. Over open woods at the back of the lot it can wait for a normal visit, as long as nobody walks under it.
The odd thing about a hanger is that the damage has not happened. A tree through the shingles has already done what it was going to do, and the job is getting it off. A hung limb is still on its way down, and the porch, the car door and the path from the drive to the house are where people stand every day without looking up. That is why it goes near the front of the line with the trees on houses, even though from the ground it looks like the calmer problem.
If the limb is resting on or tangled in a wire, Entergy clears the line before any crew touches the limb.
Why does a hanger come down days after the storm instead of during it?
It was never held. A hanger is wedged between branches or balanced across them, broken free of the tree, and it stays only while its weight sits exactly where it landed. Rain soaking into the wood, a light breeze from a new direction, a squirrel running across it or the next front can shift it a few inches and let it go.
The storm itself is a poor test. Wind blowing hard from one side can press a broken limb deeper into the crown and hold it there until the gusts drop. After ice, the branches a pine top lands on are bowed low under their own coating, and they cradle it. As they thaw they rise back toward where they grew, a few inches at a time, and whatever was resting on them tips. That usually happens on a calm day when nobody is thinking about the tree.
Some hangers are still connected at the break by a strip of torn bark or splintered wood. A strip like that tears the rest of the way under load, with no warning first.
Pine tops and hardwood limbs hang differently. A snapped pine top often lands upright or tipped against the trunk, its needles tangled in the live branches below, and since it is still green it can pass for part of the tree for weeks. An oak or hickory limb more often lies across two or three branches like a log on sawhorses, and it slides when one of them gives.
Why can’t a hanger be pulled down with a rope from the ground?
The person holding the rope stands in the one place the limb is most likely to land. A hanger does not slide off and drop neatly at the base. It falls, swings on whatever it catches, or kicks off the branches on the way down, and a rope gives it a line pointing straight back at whoever is pulling.
The weight is the other surprise. Green wood is heavy with water, and a broken pine top that looks like a branch from the yard can be a section of trunk once it is on the ground. Seen from below, against the sky, there is no way to judge it. A limb that moves once can also take other broken pieces with it, ones nobody saw from the ground.
Nobody should be underneath a hanger while it comes down, homeowner included. That means not working it loose from the ground, the deck or a window either.
How does a crew bring a hanger down over a house?
Secured first, cut second. Before anything near it is touched, the hanger is tied off to sound wood above it so it cannot move on its own. Then it is lowered under control or lifted clear with a bucket truck, and the ground under it stays empty the whole time. The broken wood it left behind is dealt with last.
- The crew reads it from the ground first: what the hanger rests on, whether any of it is still attached, and what sits under its likely drop.
- The climber ties it off. The crew’s line runs from the hanger up over a strong union in the tree, so the crew controls it instead of the branches holding it.
- It comes down on that line, in pieces if it is big, lowered past the gutters and set down in the yard. Where a truck can reach, the bucket carries the climber to it and the pieces out from the house.
- The torn stub left in the tree is cut back once the hanger is out.
On a steep lot or a lake lot where no truck can get close, the same reasoning in the guide to when a removal needs a crane instead of a climber decides how a big pine top comes out.
The hanger is priced on the written estimate before anyone goes up, the same as any other storm job.
Is the tree all right once the hanger is out?
Look at the tear it left. A limb that broke clean partway out usually needs one trim cut back at the next union, and the tree carries on. A tear that runs down into the trunk, or a pine that lost its whole top, is a closer call, and some of those trees end up as removals.
On a hardwood, the worst sign is a strip of bark peeled from the break down the trunk. That wound is wider than the limb ever was, and on an older oak it is where decay gets in. A split that opened where the limb joined the trunk is worse again, since the trunk itself is now carrying a crack into the next storm. Standing over a house, that tree is often a removal rather than a trim.
A pine that lost its top is its own question, and how much crown is left decides most of it. The guide to bent pines covers whether a pine that lost its top can be kept.
Which Hot Springs trees leave hangers most often?
Tall loblolly and shortleaf pines after ice. They snap their tops under the load and drop them into their own crowns, or into the next tree over. Old oaks over the older houses come next, carrying dead limbs that break loose in an ordinary wind and catch on the way down.
In an ice storm like the one at Christmas of 2000 the pines break all night, and the tops that lodge instead of falling are the hangers. On the ridges and around Lake Hamilton and Lake Catherine the pines stand well above the roofs, so a top that snaps falls a long way and usually has other branches to land in.
The oaks are a different pattern. On the bungalow streets off Park Avenue and Whittington, the shade trees are often big old oaks standing right over the house. A dead limb high in an old post oak or red oak can break in a summer storm, fall a few feet and lodge, and from the street it looks the same as the bare branches around it.
The third source is a neighbor’s tree. A pine that comes down through another tree’s crown strips limbs off on its way and leaves some of them broken but caught. After a tree falls next door, the standing tree it fell through is the one to look up into, from well clear of it.