Emergency Tree Removal on Newburn Drive in Wood Acres, Bethesda

During the first week of September a midday storm pushed heavy rain and strong winds across Bethesda. At 2:05 in the afternoon a homeowner on Newburn Drive, in the Wood Acres neighborhood, called to say two large trees had just hit the house.

What had happened took a moment to piece together. An exceptionally large red oak standing in a neighboring back yard had uprooted. As its root plate rose it lifted a garden shed roughly ten feet into the air, and the tree came down into the house. On the way down it struck a nearby white oak hard enough to send about half of that tree into the home as well — and to leave what remained of it standing badly damaged.

So this was not one tree on one house. It was two trees, from two properties, resting on a structure, with a third hazard — the broken white oak — still upright over the work area, and a shed suspended in mid-air on a root plate.

Why the call came to Rock Creek

Several neighbors gave the homeowners our name. We have worked in Wood Acres for years, including on jobs very like this one, where a tree has come down onto a house and has to be taken off it rather than simply cut up where it lies.

An estimator who happened to be working nearby was on Newburn Drive shortly after the call. That matters more than it sounds: the first useful thing on a job like this is not a crew, it is somebody qualified standing in the yard working out what is actually holding what up.

What the crew was looking at

A large section of the red oak and the fallen half of the white oak were driven into the right-hand side of the house, tangled through damaged walls, brickwork and chimneys. A great many branches were under tension — bent and loaded, and liable to move sharply when cut in the wrong order. The compromised white oak still standing was its own immediate hazard.

Before any of that could be touched, the insurance side had to be squared away. John walked both households through how an emergency removal and an insurance claim normally run together. Both property owners notified their carriers and got approval. We documented the damage before, during and after the work so the records could go to the insurers with the invoices.

Day one: getting the weight off the house

More rain was forecast for the following day, which set the pace. A large crew was on site by about four in the afternoon.

The first job was not the trees at all — it was clearing tree debris off a car in the driveway so the vehicle could be moved and the approach opened up. Only then could the crane be staged: our 22-ton Manitex rear-mounted boom truck, positioned for a planned sequence of lifts that would take sections of tree off the house rather than drop them through it.

The crew worked until roughly ten at night. At that point the structure was unstable enough that continuing in the dark was the wrong call, so the job was paused and picked up again at first light.

Day two: the house, the fence, and the shed in the air

About nine Rock Creek team members were back the next morning, working the tree material out of the house piece by piece. Once the structure was clear, attention moved to the sections lying on the neighboring property’s fence and to the shed still held up by the raised root plate.

That shed was the neatest piece of work on the job. Rather than cut it free and let it drop, the crew eased the root ball back down into its hole, which lowered the shed to the ground without doing it any further damage. The root ball was then ground out to make room for the repairs that had to follow.

The damaged standing portion of the white oak came down the same day, which removed the last hazard the original impact had left behind.

Mini and full-size skid steers moved material around the site, and our large grapple truck hauled the debris away — a substantial volume of it, and all without needing a road closure. Removal and cleanup were finished across the two days.

One last thing that is not tree work but matters just as much when your house is open to the sky: we put the homeowner in touch with a contractor for temporary framing and tarping, so the building was watertight before the next storms arrived.

Photographs from this job are in the album from Newburn Drive.

What this job shows about storm damage in Wood Acres

Wood Acres homeowners value the large trees that give the neighborhood its character, and rightly so. But this incident shows two things worth keeping in mind.

• A falling tree is frequently not a one-property problem. The red oak here stood in a neighbor’s yard, damaged a second neighbor’s fence and shed, and landed on a third party’s house. Three households, two insurance carriers, one tree.
• The second tree is the one people forget. The white oak was not the tree that uprooted — it was hit. Half of it went into the house and the half still standing was structurally compromised. A tree that has been struck by another tree needs looking at even when it is still upright and still in leaf.

It is also why we push inspection before storm season rather than after it. Interior decay and root problems are not visible from the ground on a standing tree in full leaf, and the time to find them is not at 2:05 on a wet afternoon.

If a tree has come down on your house

If a storm has left a tree on your home in Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Kensington or anywhere else in Montgomery County, keep clear of the area — particularly of limbs under tension and of anything near a power line — and call us. That is emergency work and we answer around the clock.

If the tree is still standing and you are uneasy about it — a lean that looks new, soil lifting at the base, a large limb over the driveway, a tree that has been struck by another — send us photographs and we will tell you whether it needs work. We did something similar in Chevy Chase this summer, on a catalpa that split and came to rest on a garage.