Is lightning hit my tree — is it going to die, and is it safe to be under? an emergency?
Within days. Current passed through the tree, superheated the moisture in its path, and blew tissue apart under steam pressure. The outcome depends on where the current traveled. Along the outside under the bark, and the tree loses a stripe of cambium and often survives. Through the middle of the trunk, and the wood is fractured internally and the tree is finished whether or not it leafs out next spring. From the ground on the day of the strike you cannot tell which happened. So a struck tree is two things at once: an immediate physical hazard from loose bark and cracked limbs, and a medium-term unknown.
What changes while you wait
The hazard from loose bark and cracked limbs is immediate — days, not weeks — and it does not wait for the next storm; wind on a hot afternoon will bring pieces down. The tree's fate, by contrast, plays out over one to three years. While you wait, the wound face dries and checks open further, decay fungi colonize the exposed wood, and secondary attackers move in on a stressed host — bark beetles in conifers, borers in hardwoods. That is why the survival call belongs at the end of a season rather than the start: the strike itself rarely kills outright, the two summers of stress that follow do.
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