North Texas storm season does not send a warning email. One spring evening the sky turns green, the sirens go off, and the trees in your yard are suddenly load-tested by straight-line winds and the occasional tornado. The trees that fail are almost never a surprise to a trained eye, because they were showing the defect for months.
The smart move is to walk your yard in early spring, before the first big storm, and check the specific points where trees actually fail. You do not need to be an arborist to spot most of these, and catching one of them can be the difference between a pruning bill and a new roof.
Here are the five failure points we check first, and what each one looks like from the ground.
1. Weak and cracked branch unions
The most common structural failure is a branch union that splits. Look where big limbs join the trunk or each other. A strong union is a wide, U-shaped crotch with solid wood. A weak one is a tight, V-shaped fork, often with a line of bark pinched down inside it, which is included bark.
Worse than a weak union is a cracked one. Any visible seam, split, or crack where major limbs meet is a limb that is already failing, and a storm will finish the job. These are the points to reduce, cable, or remove before the wind does it for you.
2. Deadwood in the canopy
Dead branches are brittle and are the first thing to break and fly in a storm. Look up into the canopy for limbs with no leaves when the rest of the tree has leafed out, peeling bark, or bare gray wood. On a big tree, a dead limb overhead is a hazard even on a calm day.
Deadwood is also a clue to the tree's overall health. A crown that is thinning and full of dead tips may be signaling root or trunk problems worth a closer look.
3. Lean and root-plate movement
A tree that has started to lean, especially recently, is telling you its anchorage is slipping. Check the base for a lean that was not there before, and look at the soil on the side the tree leans away from.
Signs of trouble at the roots include heaved or cracked soil, a raised mound of dirt on one side, and an exposed or rocking root flare. In our shrink-swell clay, a lean plus disturbed soil is a serious anchorage warning, not a cosmetic quirk.
- A new or increasing lean toward a house, driveway, or road
- Soil cracked, heaved, or mounded near the base
- Root flare exposed, sunken soil, or a trunk that seems to move at the base
4. Trunk decay and cavities
The trunk is holding the whole tree up, so any sign that it is compromised is high on the list. Walk around the entire trunk and look for cavities and holes, soft or crumbling wood, large old wounds that never sealed, mushrooms or conks growing on the bark or at the base, and vertical cracks.
Fungal conks at the base are an especially important sign, because they often indicate decay in the roots and lower trunk that you cannot see. A hollow or rotting trunk on a big tree near a target is a strong reason for a professional assessment.
One thing that fools people is that a tree can be substantially hollow and still stand fine, because trees carry their strength in the outer wood. What matters is how much sound wood is left in the shell relative to the trunk's diameter, and whether the decay is paired with other defects like a lean or a big open wound. That judgment, how much hollow is too much, is exactly the kind of call worth getting a trained eye on rather than guessing. A tree you write off as doomed may be fine, and one you assume is solid because it is green up top may be running on a thin rind of wood over a rotten core.
5. Trees and limbs over targets
The final check is about consequences. A defect over open lawn is a low priority; the same defect over your bedroom, your car, or the power line is urgent. Walk the yard and note where large limbs and whole trees would land if they failed.
Prioritize the trees whose failure would hit something that matters, and get those assessed first. Walk the yard with a notepad and rank the trees by consequence, not just by how bad they look, because a perfect tree over the bedroom deserves more attention than a rough-looking one over the back fence. Our residential tree care team runs exactly this kind of pre-storm audit, and our storm damage cleanup crews are the ones you will want to already know if a warning does come true. Homeowners across Lewisville book a spring audit precisely so they are not making that first call in the middle of a storm. Call (855) 615-0568 for a free spring tree safety audit before the sirens sound.
The defects that turn a spring tree into a projectile
Before tornado season peaks in April and May, we walk a property looking for the features wind exploits. The top one is a codominant stem with included bark, two trunks of near-equal size fighting for the same space, which is the classic failure point in a straight-line wind event. Next is a lopsided canopy that acts like a sail, often the result of a neighbor or a past bad prune. Then deadwood, which becomes the loose ammunition that breaks windows and injures people well before the whole tree goes.
The single biggest mistake we correct in spring is last season's lion-tailing, where someone stripped all the interior foliage and left heavy tufts at the branch ends. That moves weight to the tips and makes a limb whip and snap in gusts, the opposite of what was intended. Proper storm prep is crown thinning that lets wind pass through evenly and a modest reduction of over-extended limbs. We also check the root plate for heaving or mushrooms, because a tree already loosening at the base needs no tornado to come down.
- Identify codominant stems with included bark before peak storm season
- Thin the crown evenly so wind passes through instead of pushing a solid sail
- Remove deadwood that becomes flying debris in the first strong gust
- Undo prior lion-tailing and check the root plate for heave or fungal growth