Emergency Tree Removal

Pro Tree Service provides emergency tree removal and storm response 24 hours a day across Illinois and northwest Indiana. Tree on a house, limb through a roof, trunk blocking the driveway, split leader hanging over a bedroom — call and we will tell you honestly how quickly we can reach you.

What to Do in the First Hour

Most of the damage that happens after a storm happens in the cleanup, not the storm. A short checklist before anyone picks up a saw.

1. Get everyone out from under itA tree resting on a roof is still moving. Wood under tension shifts as it dries and as weight redistributes. Close off the rooms underneath and stay out of them.
2. Photograph everything before you touch itWide shots showing the whole tree and the structure, then close shots of the damage. Photograph the trunk, the root plate, and any visible crack or cavity. This is the single most useful thing you can do for a claim, and it takes two minutes.
3. Call your insurance carrier and open a claimGet a claim number before work begins. Emergency measures to prevent further damage are generally covered, but carriers want to be told first.
4. Tarp what is open, if you can do it from the groundWater entering through a hole does more damage over the next two days than the tree did in the first two minutes. Do not go on a storm-damaged roof.
5. Do not cut anything under tensionA bent trunk, a pinned limb, a leaning tree held up by another tree. These release suddenly and with real force. This is where most homeowner chainsaw injuries happen.
6. Call us and describe what you are looking atAddress, what the tree hit, whether anyone is displaced, whether wires are involved. That is enough for us to place you in the queue accurately.

How We Prioritize Emergency Tree Removal During a Regional Storm

When a significant wind or ice event moves through, the entire region calls in the same hour. Any company telling you otherwise during a widespread event is guessing. Here is how we actually work it.

• Trees on occupied structures come firstA tree into a house someone is living in outranks everything else, regardless of when the call came in.
• Then blocked accessDriveways, garage doors, and anything preventing someone from leaving or a vehicle from reaching the property.
• Then hazards still standingSplit leaders, hanging limbs, and partially uprooted trees that have not come down yet but will.
• Then everything elseTrees down in open yard, fence damage, and cleanup.

We stage crews inside the affected area rather than spreading them across the map, because drive time between jobs is what actually determines how many properties get cleared in a day. If you are going to wait, we will tell you roughly how long rather than promise a window we cannot hold.

What Your Insurance Will and Will Not Cover

This is the question we get most often, and the answer surprises people. Policies vary and yours governs, but the general pattern across most homeowners policies in Illinois and Indiana works like this.

• A tree that hits a covered structure is usually coveredHouse, garage, shed, fence. The repair to the structure and the removal of the tree from it are typically part of the same claim, subject to your deductible.
• A tree that falls and hits nothing often is notIf it lands in open yard and damages nothing, many policies treat removal as a maintenance expense rather than a covered loss. This catches people out constantly.
• Debris removal is frequently capped separatelyEven on a covered claim, the removal portion is often subject to its own much smaller limit, independent of the structural repair.
• A tree that was already dead or visibly defective is the hard caseCarriers may argue a known hazard was a maintenance issue rather than storm damage. Dead ash trees are the common version of this argument in our area.

The Equipment Question

Storm work is different from scheduled work. The tree is not where anyone planned for it to be, it is often under load, and there is frequently no room to drop anything.

• CraneOwned in-house, not rented
• Bucket trucksFor work a climber should not do
• ChippersBrush handled on site
• Since 1989Family owned, based in Mokena

A tree lying across a roof usually cannot be felled. It has to be taken off in pieces, in a controlled sequence, with each piece supported before it is cut free. That is crane and bucket work. We own ours rather than renting, which is why we can commit to a storm response window at all — we are not waiting on somebody else’s equipment schedule during the exact week everybody wants it.

Our crews are our own employees, on our payroll and our workers compensation policy. During storm season a great deal of out-of-area work gets subcontracted to crews nobody has vetted. If someone is injured on your property, whose coverage responds is a question worth being able to answer cleanly.

Where We Respond

We work throughout the Chicago southland and southwest suburbs, north and northwest Cook County, and across the state line into northwest Indiana. Coverage is organized by county: Cook, Will, and DuPage in Illinois, and northwest Indiana. The full list is on our service area page.

If your town is not listed, call anyway. During a regional event we stage crews wherever the damage is concentrated, and we will tell you straight away whether we can reach you.

After the Storm: What to Look At Before the Next One

The tree that comes down in the next storm is usually visible after this one. Once the immediate work is done, walk the property and look for four things.

• A lifted or cracked root plateSoil heaved up on one side of the trunk, or a visible gap where the ground has separated. The tree is already failing even if it still looks upright.
• Split forks and hanging limbsA crack where two stems join is the most common structural failure point in mature trees. Anything hung up in the canopy will come down eventually, and it chooses its own timing.
• Dead ashEmerald ash borer has effectively cleared ash from this region. A dead ash dries and turns brittle, and past a certain point it can no longer be climbed safely — it has to come down from a bucket or crane, which costs considerably more than removing the same tree the year it died. Standing dead ash gets more expensive the longer it stands.
• Fresh leanCompare against a fixed reference such as a fence line or downspout. A lean that appeared during the storm is a different problem from one the tree grew into over twenty years.

We also handle preventive trimming, tree and bush removal, stump grinding, and land and lot clearing. Estimates are free and we schedule them any day of the week.

Pro Tree Service · 19253 South Blackhawk Parkway #80, Mokena, Illinois 60448 · Serving Illinois and northwest Indiana since 1989 · Emergency tree removal and storm response 24 hours a day, 7 days a week