Is this tree's never been pruned and it's out of control an emergency?
Not urgent. 'Never pruned' is not a diagnosis. Forest trees are never pruned and do fine. What differs in a yard is that an open-grown tree builds a wide, heavy, low crown with no competition to correct it, and nobody removed the competing stem at year eight when it was a five-minute cut. So what you are looking at is accumulated correctable structure plus accumulated deadwood, and the actual risk usually narrows to one or two identifiable parts: a large dead limb over somewhere people stand, or a tight V-shaped union with included bark that will split under wind or ice.
What changes while you wait
Watch, on a season-to-year timeline — with one exception to check today. Walk under it and look up: any dead limb thicker than your arm suspended over a deck, patio, driveway, play area, or a path you use daily is a days-timeline item no matter how healthy the rest of the tree looks, because dead wood comes down on calm afternoons with no warning. Everything else waits for scheduled pruning. What changes while you wait is that overextended limbs gain weight and their unions carry more load each year, and an ignored weak union fails during a storm rather than during an inspection — in this climate, a summer straight-line wind or a winter ice load.
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