How does an amur maple hold up in a storm?
Too short and too low-slung to be a real structural threat to a house; ice damage means splayed and bent multi-stems rather than dangerous limb failure. The clump form does split apart at the base under heavy snow and ice load, and once a clump has splayed it essentially never returns to shape — that is a replacement decision, not a cabling one.
What pruning can and can't prevent
Prune in summer once the leaves have hardened off, since like all maples it bleeds heavily from late-winter cuts. The species-specific trap is that it is nearly always grown as a multi-stem clump or a sheared hedge, and years of shearing build a dense green outer shell over dead, weak interior wood — the fix is thinning whole stems out at the base, not shearing it tighter again.
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