Is my scotch pine safe in a storm?
Alive it is only moderate under ice — the crooked trunk and heavy divergent limbs leave an old open-grown tree off-balance, and the leaners tend to fail at the root plate rather than snapping mid-trunk. Dead is a different tree entirely: pine-wilt kills dry out fast, and standing dead Scotch pines shed large limbs and go over in ordinary wind, which is the real argument against letting one stand through a season.
What pruning can and can't prevent
There is very little worth pruning on one, and the rule that matters is timing for disease reasons rather than shape: cut and move wood in late fall through winter, before sawyer beetles are flying, so you are not creating fresh attractant or hauling infested logs during beetle season. Like every pine it will not regenerate from bare wood, so shaping is limited to pinching candles in spring.
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