When Wind Becomes the Judge of Tree Pruning

JUN

Windy days tell the truth. Even moderate gusts expose whether a city’s pruning approach is actually serving public safety — or simply checking boxes.

At North Star, our philosophy stays simple: do what is right for the tree while reducing liability for the community. Reducing, not eliminating; facts are facts — no arborist, no company, no human can eliminate all risk from complex living organisms. To pretend otherwise drifts into believing we can control forces far bigger than us. That’s not reality.

But here is where things get interesting.

Our pruning approach gets tested hardest on windy days, and so does everyone else’s. Recently, I’ve begun to wonder whether some of the metrics used by well-meaning city staff unintentionally send the wrong signals. It seems possible that if a city measures “success” mostly by how fast a contractor responds to downed limbs, broken branches, or uprooted trees, rather than how rarely those emergencies occur, we may be rewarding reaction instead of prevention.

Now, North Star’s cities consistently show fewer emergency requests compared to others. This can be verified through public records requests of work types performed by each contractor in each municipality.

The natural question becomes:
How do you measure the significance of the emergencies that never happened?
How do you acknowledge the value of a pruning method that quietly prevents failure months or years later?

Because in urban forestry, the absence of a 2 a.m. call-out is the success story — even if it’s invisible.

Some companies require far more emergency responses. Why? That’s for each reader to decide, based on publicly available data. It may be due to tree age, species mix, weather patterns, budget constraints, or simply the pruning philosophy used. I can’t claim to know their intent, and I don’t presume any wrongdoing. Emergency line items on bid sheets are typically the most profitable — that’s standard across the industry.

Could a company theoretically design a business model that benefits from higher emergency volume? It seems unlikely… but the question is fair to ask.

What says you?