Tree Trunk Risk

Trees add beauty and value to landscapes, but they can also add risk. Risk is the chance that the tree has a failure, just a branch or maybe the whole tree, and that failure causes damage to valuable “targets” – things like cars, houses, people. When the risky part of the tree is easy to see and reach, folks often fix it themselves.

A tree’s trunk is the most easily seen part of that tree – it’s right there in front of your face. Big cracks and splits are seen by people who creatively “fix” them. The fixes may last a long while, but they may also lead to future complications with the tree. Those can add a lot of risk to the future tree worker who must deal with the consequences of others’ past actions.

The mulberry pictured below has a split trunk with significant decay.  Years ago, someone put steel cables around the trunk, nice and tight, and filled the cavity with expanding foam. Over subsequent years, the mass above increased and the tissue below decayed, and more and more load shifted from wood to steel.  Today, there are incalculable forces, tensions, hinges, arcs of momentum, all wrapped up together in the living body of the tree. 

Any approach to resolving this ticking time bomb must factor in the owner’s risk profile, tree health outside of this issue, cost to slowly mitigate versus cost to remove and start over. There is no single right answer, but Legacy Tree Company can help you think it through.

Click here to find out more about our Albuquerque tree removal services.