If a tree just fell on your house, make four calls in this order: first, get everyone out of the damaged part of the home and stay clear of the tree. Second, call your electric utility if any wire is touching the tree, the roof, or the ground — never touch or approach it. Third, call your homeowners insurance claims line to open a claim before cleanup starts. Fourth, call a 24/7 emergency tree service to get the tree off the structure safely. Call 911 before anything else if someone is hurt, you smell gas, or a line is sparking.
In the Logan and Hocking Hills area, Reliable Tree Service answers the phone 24/7: (740) 216-8262.
Here's what each of those steps actually involves, what to say on each call, and a few mistakes that make a bad night worse.
Step 1: Get everyone out and stay out
A tree on a house is rarely done moving. The trunk is still loading the roof framing, branches are under tension like drawn bows, and the root plate that tipped can keep shifting — especially in the saturated ground that usually caused the failure in the first place. Move everyone to a part of the house away from the impact, or out of the house entirely if the structure is groaning, doors have stopped closing, or you can see daylight where you shouldn't.
Do not go up on the roof, and do not go into the attic under the impact zone to "check the damage." Photos from the ground and from neighboring angles are all your insurer needs at this stage. If it's dark, wait for daylight or use your phone from a distance — nothing about documentation is worth standing under a suspended trunk.
If anyone is injured, if you smell gas, or if a downed wire is arcing or has started a fire, that's a 911 call before anything on this list.
Step 2: If a power line is involved, the utility comes first
This is the step people get wrong most often, so let's be direct: no tree service should touch a tree that's in contact with a power line — including ours. Line clearance is the utility's job, with the utility's equipment, on a de-energized line. Any crew that offers to start cutting while a wire is still tangled in the canopy is telling you something important about their judgment.
Call your electric provider's outage/emergency line and report "tree on the line" with your address. For most homes in Logan and the surrounding Hocking County countryside, that means AEP Ohio or the South Central Power cooperative, depending on where you live — the name is on your electric bill.
Until they arrive, treat everything as live: the tree, the wire, puddles near it, and metal fences or gutters the tree is touching. A downed line doesn't have to spark or hum to be energized, and the ground itself can carry current for several feet around the contact point. Once the utility clears or kills the line, the tree crew can take over. That handoff order isn't red tape — it's the difference between a bad day and a fatal one.
Step 3: Open the insurance claim before cleanup starts
Call the claims number on your homeowners policy (or in your insurer's app) and report the loss the same day. You don't need estimates or a contractor lined up to open a claim — you need a claim number, which everything else attaches to.
A few things worth knowing, framed as typical national coverage patterns since every policy differs:
- Tree on a covered structure (house, attached garage, fence, shed): standard policies generally cover removing the tree from the structure and repairing the damage, minus your deductible. Wind and storm are covered perils on nearly all policies.
- Tree down in the yard, nothing hit: coverage shrinks fast. Nationally, many policies cap debris removal for that scenario somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand dollars per tree, and some don't cover it at all. If a healthy tree simply fell in the grass, be prepared for the removal to be out of pocket.
- A neighbor's tree fell on your house: your policy handles it, not theirs. That feels backwards, but trees felled by weather are treated as acts of nature — whose yard the trunk started in usually doesn't matter unless the tree was a documented, known hazard they'd ignored.
Two practical moves that make claims go smoother: photograph everything before any cutting starts (wide shots showing the tree on the structure, plus close-ups of the damage), and keep every receipt — emergency tarping, board-up, hotel night, all of it. Reliable Tree Service works with homeowners insurance providers on storm-damage jobs regularly, and we document our removals with the claim process in mind, which spares you a back-and-forth with the adjuster later.
Step 4: Call a 24/7 emergency tree crew
Once people are safe and any line issue belongs to the utility, the tree itself needs to come off the house — and this is genuinely not a chainsaw-and-a-ladder job. A trunk resting on a roof is a suspended load with unpredictable tension and compression points. Cut the wrong side and the butt end kicks, the load rolls, or the whole stem drops through the sheathing it was merely resting on. Professional crews rig the tree, take the weight with ropes or machinery, and remove it in controlled pieces so nothing free-falls onto an already-wounded roof.
That controlled, off-the-structure work is exactly what our emergency and storm damage service exists for, and it's why the line is answered around the clock — trees don't check the forecast before they fall, and a punctured roof in a thunderstorm is taking on water by the minute. Once the emergency piece is off the house, the remaining trunk, the debris, and any standing portion of the tree become a standard tree removal job, which can be scheduled and quoted normally — often as part of the same insurance claim.
One honest note that can save you money: if the tree missed everything — no structure, no vehicle, no blocked driveway, no lean over a target — it's not an emergency, and you shouldn't pay emergency urgency for it. A downed tree lying flat in the yard is stable. Get a normal estimate on a normal weekday and keep the difference.
What not to do while you wait
- Don't sign anything from a door-knocker. Major storms bring out-of-town crews that canvass damaged neighborhoods pushing on-the-spot contracts and insurance paperwork. Slow down, get proof of insurance from anyone who'll be on your property, and never sign over your claim benefits to a contractor you met an hour ago.
- Don't pay large sums up front. A deposit can be reasonable; full payment before a saw starts is not.
- Don't start cutting yourself. Even the small stuff — a branch under tension can release with hundreds of pounds of force, and storm cleanup consistently injures more homeowners than the storms do.
- Don't delay the tarp. If the roof is opened up and rain is coming, temporary tarping or board-up is usually claim-covered and prevents the interior damage from dwarfing the roof damage.
A local note for Logan and the Hocking Hills
Around here, this scenario is a matter of when, not if. The same dense canopy that makes the Hocking Hills beautiful — mature oaks, maples, and tall pines growing tight against homes on wooded lots — means straight-line winds and summer thunderstorms routinely put trees on structures from Logan out through the ridgetop and hollow properties around Rockbridge. Shallow-rooted trees in rain-soaked ground are the classic failure we get called about after a storm rolls up the Hocking River valley.
Reliable Tree Service has been doing this work locally since 2015 — 5,000 projects across eleven years, bonded and insured, based right in Logan. The emergency line at (740) 216-8262 is answered 24/7. Save the number before you need it; the night you're standing in the yard looking at a trunk across your roofline is a bad time to start googling.