Is my northern catalpa safe in a storm?

Catalpa has a brittle reputation and the wood earns it, but it actually rides out ice better than that reputation implies — the branching is coarse and open with few, thick twigs, so it accumulates far less glaze load than a fine-twigged birch or willow, and ice-damage surveys generally rank it resistant. Its real failure mode is summer wind on a big-leafed crown combined with decay in old wounds: whole limbs let go at a crotch on a humid, still-feeling day rather than under a January ice load.