The last storm that rolled through the metro left trees toppled, roots in the air, some even sprawled across a crushed roof of a car or home.
A lot goes into making these trees fall, and homeowners can protect themselves and their property with a little upkeep the next time around.
There's no better time than now to trim any trees with unhealthy or low hanging branches that could become potentially hazardous.
"If a limb, a trunk or the complete trunk were to fail, what would it impact," said Michael Dougherty, Urban Forestry Consultant.
Several metro areas are still dealing with the damage after trees went down during Saturday’s storms.
"Limb failures, trunk failures or complete tree failures, there is an explanation for why that part of the tree failed," said Dougherty.
Generally, decay or rotting are the main reasons trees are tumbling down.
"In this case, on this large silver maple, this problem developed in the first 5 or 7 years in this tree's life, 70, 80 plus years ago," said Dougherty.
In other situations, trees have developed more than one trunk.
"Since it wasn't pruned properly in youth, you've got at least 2 to 3 trunks. It did not fail today, but someday if it lives to its full potential, that will fail," said Dougherty.
The most difficult situation for a homeowner to predict is complete tree failure when the trunk comes up out of the ground.
"The average person does not know all these things, you know, what to look for as far as poor structures or co-dominant stems that may be weak structurally," said Dougherty.
Dougherty said healthy branches coming out of the trunk will be greater than a 45-degree angle.
"There's another fork, now this branch attachment is pretty good, see how it comes out and then goes up, so that, even though that's kind of a 45, that's strongly attached to the trunk," said Dougherty.
The best thing Dougherty said you can do is to have an arborist come out to your home and take a look at your trees to make sure they're healthy enough to stand tall. Proper cabling, proper pruning and even full removal of some trees or branches will also help to avoid future storm damage.
