The storm broke the top out of my tree — what should I do?
A shattered splintered stub where the leader used to be, not a clean break; broken material still hung up in the crown, caught on lower limbs; a vertical crack or split running down from the break into the main trunk; bark peeled away in a long strip below it; a crown suddenly lopsided; the top resting on a roof, fence, deck, or into the service drop. Also check the ground: lifted soil or a raised mound on the side opposite the lean means the root plate moved too. Two separate problems arrived at once. The immediate one is unsupported mass suspended in the air — hung limbs and cracked-but-attached wood have no predictable timing and come down with no wind at all. The longer one is that a torn top is a wound the tree cannot close, dropping a decay column straight down the center of the stem and leaving no leader to rebuild from. Whether this tree has a future is a question for next month. Whether anyone should be standing under it is a question for right now.
What to do about it
Call tonight. Normally a storm damage cleanup job, $400–$4,000 around Indianapolis depending on size and access.
Can the tree be kept
It depends almost entirely on where the break is. A single leader broken out of a young or midsize tree with the rest of the crown intact can be reduced back to sound wood and retrained over several seasons — trees do this in the wild constantly. A break that took more than roughly half the crown, or that cracked down into the main trunk, or that left no live growing point below it, is generally a removal, as is any of that on a fast-decaying species. Do not have the stub cut flat across; the cut should go back to a lateral branch large enough to take over as a leader. And do not let anyone top the remaining limbs to 'balance' it.
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