Thirty-plus years in tree work and the wind still surprises Paul. A 20-inch-diameter spruce, snapped 60 feet down from the top, the upper trunk laid into a neighboring tree. No hurricane. Just spring wind in South Jersey.
Most homeowners think of wind damage as something that happens during a named storm. The truth is that ordinary wind — the kind that shows up on a normal April afternoon in South Jersey — takes down structurally compromised trees all the time. The headline-grade events get attention. The everyday failures don’t. They’re also the ones an arborist could have flagged a year in advance.
View from the Field · Paul Biester · Tree Awareness
“The power of wind never ceases to amaze me. In 30-plus years of doing tree work — this is an over-20-inch-diameter spruce that the wind just took and snapped about 60 feet of a top right out and laid it into another tree. Amazing. So we’ve got a price-rigging this out, but this is my day, out looking at work.” Paul Biester · NJ LTE #408
A spruce trunk that’s 20 inches in diameter is structurally substantial. On paper, it should hold against ordinary wind loading. The reason this one didn’t comes down to one of three failure modes that an arborist on a routine visit would have flagged.
Internal decay. The exterior of the trunk looks healthy. Bark is intact. No visible defects from the ground. Inside, fungal decay has hollowed enough of the structural wood that the cross-section the tree is actually relying on is much smaller than its outside diameter suggests. A resistograph drill test, or a sonic tomograph on a high-value tree, finds this. A visual-only assessment can miss it entirely.
Co-dominant stems with included bark. Two leaders growing from a tight V-shaped union, with bark trapped in the crotch instead of the wood fully bonding. Looks normal. Acts normal. Until enough wind load gets behind the canopy mass on one side and the union splits down the trunk.
Crown imbalance. A spruce that’s grown crowded in a stand develops a one-sided canopy that catches wind asymmetrically. The trunk grew to support a balanced load. Once neighbors are removed (a common scenario after construction or a logging operation), the asymmetric load amplifies in any wind event the tree didn’t evolve under.
From the description in the video — clean snap 60 feet up, no obvious lean, no storm of unusual intensity — the most likely cause is the first or third. Decay or imbalance. The visible failure happened in seconds. The underlying setup happened over years.
Once a top has snapped and laid into a neighboring tree, the cleanup is more dangerous than the original removal would have been. The fallen top is suspended — partially supported by the receiving tree, partially still attached to the standing trunk. The forces in the wood are no longer behaving the way the original tree’s architecture set them up to behave.
The rigging approach: cut the suspended sections in pieces small enough to control individually, with rigging lines anchored above each cut to take the load as the wood is severed. The receiving tree may need its own line work to manage the canopy that’s pressing into it. The goal is to get every piece down without it swinging into the receiving tree, the climber, or anything on the ground.
This is not the kind of work to attempt with a chainsaw and a ladder. Suspended-tree cleanup is one of the highest-risk operations in arboriculture, and it’s why Paul says “we’ve got to price-rig this out” — the price reflects the rigging plan, the equipment, the climber-hours, and the risk premium.
The failure in this video was preventable. Not because the wind was avoidable — but because the conditions inside the tree that allowed a 20-inch trunk to snap should have been visible to a qualified arborist with the right tools, on a routine inspection cycle, well before the day the wind found it.
This is the case for annual visual tree risk assessment on mature, high-value trees. The goal isn’t to prevent every failure. It’s to find the trees with the highest probability of failure before they fail, and to either correct the defect (cabling, bracing, reduction pruning) or remove the tree on a planned schedule rather than emergency response.
Mature trees on your property that haven’t been assessed? A TRAQ-qualified visual risk assessment is the right next step. Schedule a Tree Risk Assessment →
