A Tree Fell on Your House. What to Do in the First Hour.

A tree on the house is disorienting, and the instinct is to start dealing with it immediately. The order below is what protects people first and your claim second, and it costs you nothing to follow.

1. Get clear, and stay clear

Move everyone out of the affected part of the house, including rooms directly underneath a tree resting on the roof. A tree that has stopped moving is not the same thing as a tree that is stable. Trunks resting on a roofline are often supported at two points with the weight hanging between them, and that arrangement can shift.

Keep pets and children well away from the whole area, not just the room.

2. Check for power lines before anything else

If the tree, or any limb, is in contact with an electrical line, treat the whole area as live. Downed conductors can energise a wet fence, a puddle, or the tree itself, and there is no way to tell by looking.

Call Georgia Power and 911 before you call a tree company. No legitimate crew will cut anything in contact with an energised line. That is the utility's work, and it has to come first.

3. Photograph everything, before any cutting

This is the step people skip and later regret. Your adjuster will want to see the damage as it was, not after a crew has taken the tree off. Take more than you think you need:

• Wide shots showing the whole tree and the whole house
• The point of impact from several angles
• Interior damage, including ceilings and any water coming in
• Damaged contents where the roof has been breached
• The base of the tree, showing the root plate or the break

Your phone timestamps them, which is exactly what makes them useful. A crew will take its own set as well, but yours are earlier.

4. Open the claim

Call your insurer and start the claim before the work happens rather than afterwards. Most homeowners policies cover removal when a fallen tree has damaged a covered structure such as the house, the garage, or a fence. Coverage is much less certain for a tree that falls and hits nothing. Deductibles and per-tree caps vary enough that you need to read your own policy rather than rely on what a neighbour was told.

Ask the tree company for an itemised invoice. Adjusters generally want the work broken out rather than a single figure.

5. Do not start cutting

Storm-damaged trees are under load. Limbs are bent, pinned, and storing energy, and cutting them in the wrong order releases that energy somewhere nobody predicted. Most serious chainsaw injuries in storm work happen on limbs under tension, which behave nothing like the tree you cut up last autumn. This is the single most dangerous work in the trade and it is not the moment to find that out.

Equally, do not climb up to inspect the roof.

6. Be careful who you hire

After a named storm, out of town crews follow the damage down the coast and will be knocking on doors within days. Some are perfectly good. Many are uninsured, which matters enormously, because an uninsured worker injured in your yard, or a limb put through your roof by an uninsured crew, becomes your problem and your policy.

Ask for a certificate of insurance and check the name on it matches who you are speaking to. Treat cash-only demands, large deposits up front, no local address, and pressure to sign immediately as reasons to slow down. Get the price in writing before work starts.

7. Then call

Once people are safe, the utility has been called if needed, and you have your photographs, that is the point to bring in emergency tree removal. Tell us what the tree landed on and whether anything is touching a line. Storm work takes priority over our scheduled jobs.