Prepping Your Trees for Tornado & Storm Season in Joplin

Joplin homeowners don’t need a reminder that storms here are serious. The 2011 EF-5 tornado is part of the city’s memory, and every spring brings a fresh round of severe weather — straight-line winds, hail, ice storms, and the occasional tornado warning that has everyone in the bathtub by 9 p.m. You can’t storm-proof a tree. But you can absolutely tilt the odds in your favor with a few practical, late-winter steps.

Why Trees Fail in Storms (Usually)

When a tree comes down in a Joplin storm, it’s rarely just "the wind." Almost always, one or more of these conditions was true before the storm:

• Significant deadwood or dead canopy
• Co-dominant trunks with included bark
• Decay at the base or main union
• Root issues — old construction damage, severed roots from utility work, or root rot
• Crown that hadn’t been thinned and acted like a sail

Most of those are fixable, or at least reducible. Here’s how.

Step 1: Walk Your Trees Before Spring

The single highest-value thing you can do is walk your property in late winter — January or February — and look at every tree over 20 feet tall. Look for:

• Dead limbs (easier to spot when surrounding trees are bare)
• Cracks or seams in the trunk
• Co-dominant trunks with included bark — the classic Bradford pear and silver maple failure pattern
• Fungal bodies at the base or on the trunk
• Roots that look damaged, exposed, or recently disturbed
• A lean that wasn’t there last fall

You don’t have to diagnose everything — just flag anything that catches your eye and have a local arborist look at it before storm season.

Step 2: Remove Deadwood and Hangers

The cheapest, fastest win in storm prep is deadwood removal. Dead limbs are the projectiles in any windstorm — they come off first, fly the farthest, and do disproportionate damage. A standard "crown cleaning" removes dead, broken, and diseased limbs along with crossing branches. It’s typically the most affordable pruning service we do, and the highest-impact for storm safety.

Step 3: Reduce End Weight on Heavy Limbs

Big horizontal limbs — especially on silver maples, sweetgums, and some oaks — get heavier and longer over time. When a thunderstorm dumps 2 inches of rain in 20 minutes and a 50 mph gust hits, those limbs are loaded with water weight and acting as enormous levers.

End-weight reduction is the practice of shortening those long horizontal limbs without changing the natural shape of the tree. It pulls the lever arm in, reduces failure risk, and stresses the tree far less than topping or stub-cutting (both of which we never recommend).

Step 4: Address Co-Dominant Trunks Before They Split

If you have a tree with two main trunks meeting in a tight V near the ground — and especially if you can see bark pinched between them — it has a built-in weak point. Options:

• Subordination pruning — slowly reducing one of the two trunks over time so the tree commits to a single dominant leader
• Cabling or bracing — installing steel cables between the two trunks high up in the canopy to limit how much they can sway independently
• Removal — if the tree is over a target and the union is already cracked

None of these are emergency fixes. They’re winter work, planned in advance.

Step 5: Protect Root Zones

This is the one homeowners don’t think about. Trees fail in storms partly because their roots can’t hold the soil. Things that compromise root systems:

• Driving heavy equipment under the canopy (compacts soil)
• Trenching for utilities, irrigation, or fence posts close to the trunk
• Excessive mulch piled against the trunk ("mulch volcanoes")
• Recent construction within the drip line

If you had any of those happen in the last 1–3 years, the tree’s root system is still adjusting. Have an arborist look at it specifically.

Step 6: Keep an Emergency Plan

Have a plan for storm night that doesn’t involve dealing with trees in the moment. Specifically:

• Know where the safest interior room is in your house
• Park cars on the side of the driveway with the fewest large trees overhead
• Save the number for a real local tree service in your phone before the storm — not at 3 a.m. when everyone is calling
• Know where your insurance card and policy number are

What Storm-Prepped Trees Actually Look Like

You don’t want a yard full of bonsai. A storm-prepped tree should look like a healthy version of itself: dead wood gone, no obvious cracks, no included bark in major unions, balanced canopy, and reasonable end weights. A well-pruned mature oak should look almost identical to an un-pruned mature oak from 30 feet away — the difference is in the details.

Get a Free Pre-Storm Walk-Through

Every spring we do free property walk-throughs for Joplin homeowners who want a professional second opinion before storm season. We’ll flag what we’d address, what we’d leave alone, and what — if anything — we’d remove. No high-pressure sales. Just an honest look at your trees.