A tree fell on your house: safety, the tarp, and the insurance claim

A tree resting on a roof or a wall is two separate jobs done by two separate trades, in a specific order.

The tree itself, especially the part resting on the structure, comes off first, and it is arborist and crane work, not a restoration task. A tree under the kind of tension described above needs to be rigged and cut down in a controlled sequence, work governed by its own safety standard. Prime does not pull branches off a roof to inspect the damage underneath it, and a homeowner should not either.

Once the hazardous part of the tree is off the structure, Prime tarps the opening, clears storm debris from the work area, and handles everything the water did once it was inside: extraction, drying, moisture documentation, and rebuild of what could not be dried. If the roof covering itself needs repair or replacement once the tarp is up, that permanent fix is licensed roofing work, the same division of labor as any other roof-related loss on this site.

A tree-caused opening behaves differently from an ordinary roof leak, because the hole itself is irregular and often still has debris in it, bark, splintered wood, leaves, sitting in the same cavity the water is entering through. That debris can hold water against the framing longer than a clean hole would, and it is one more reason the opening gets tarped rather than only patched from inside.

Past that point, water inside a roof or wall cavity behaves the way it does after any opening: it runs along the top of the framing before it drops, so a stain on a ceiling is often several feet from where the tree actually broke through. The full mechanics of how water travels inside a wall or ceiling cavity, and how Prime maps it with a moisture meter and thermal camera before anything gets opened, are covered on our roof leak water damage page, which this page does not repeat.

A homeowners policy commonly covers sudden and accidental damage a tree does to your house, garage, or another covered structure. The carrier decides, based on the facts of the loss and the specific policy language.

A tree that comes down in a storm and lands on a covered structure is generally the kind of event that language describes, a clear cause and a documented timeline. A tree that falls without hitting anything is a different situation, since most policies treat removing it as the homeowner's own cost unless it is blocking a driveway or a ramp built for a disability. Prime documents the point of impact, the opening, and every surface the water reached, because that record is what a carrier works from. We do not file claims and we do not tell you what your policy covers. We give you a written, dated scope of what we found, and you submit it to your own carrier.