A Tree Fell on My House. What to Do in the First 24 Hours

A tree through your roof is two emergencies at once: a structural one and a water one. The order you handle the next few hours in matters more than how fast you move. People come out first, live wires get a wide berth, and nothing is touched or cleaned up until it's photographed. Everything else waits.

Here is the sequence, roughly hour by hour, written for someone standing in the driveway looking at a trunk where the ceiling used to be. Work it in order. Jumping ahead to the cleanup or the phone calls before the safety steps is how people get hurt and how claims get weaker.

Get everyone out from under the impact — and keep them out

Move everyone, pets included, out of the rooms under and around the strike and into a part of the house the tree didn't touch, or outside. A trunk or heavy limb that has stopped moving is not done moving. It settles as it sheds branches, and the framing it's resting on can give way minutes or hours later.

Water makes this worse fast. Drywall soaking up rain gains weight by the minute, and a saturated ceiling can drop in a full sheet with no warning. Do not stand under a bulging or dripping ceiling to catch water or drag furniture out. Pull the doors to the affected rooms shut if you can reach the handles safely, and stay out until the roof is stabilized and someone has checked the structure.

If wires are down or the mast was torn off, call 911

Before anyone walks the perimeter, look up. If the tree took down a power line, or pulled the service mast — the pipe and cable where the utility's wire connects to your house — off the wall, treat the whole area as energized. A downed line can be live, and it can charge wet ground and any metal fence or railing it's touching. Do not approach it, and keep everyone well back.

1. Call 911 for any downed line near an occupied home. They dispatch and coordinate with the utility.
2. Call your electric utility's emergency line and report a downed wire or a pulled service mast specifically — that routes a different crew than a routine outage. PSE&G covers Bergen, Passaic, Essex, and Hudson counties; JCP&L covers most of Morris County.
3. Only if you can reach your main electrical panel on a dry floor, without passing under the damaged area or standing in water, shut off the main breaker. If reaching the panel means walking under the strike or through water, leave it and wait for the utility.

Do not climb up to look

The instinct is to grab a flashlight and go up into the attic, or step outside and get on a ladder to see the roof. Don't do either. A tree impact can crack rafters, split the ridge board, and shift the decking without any of it showing from the ground — which means the attic floor and the roof surface may not hold your weight. The attic is also where water is now pooling on top of insulation and around wiring.

You don't need to see it yourself to report it. Everything a roofer or an adjuster needs can be captured from the ground and from windows. Walking a roof after a tree hit is how people fall through decking that looks intact and isn't.

Call a roofer for emergency stabilization

Once people are safe and the power situation is handled, call a roofer for emergency stabilization. What that looks like depends on what the tree is doing. If the tree is still on the roof and bearing load, a tarp usually can't go on until the tree is off and the structure is checked — a tarp draped over a trunk does nothing. Stabilization in that case is interior protection and a plan, not an instant cover.

If the tree has come to rest off the roof and left you with an open hole, emergency tarping buys time against the next rain. A tarp battened down with strapping — not stapled to wet shingles — holds until the permanent repair. Tree impacts are their own category of damage, and a proper tree damage repair has to account for framing and decking, not just the shingle covering. We answer calls and texts around the clock at (973) 337-9001.

Photograph everything from the ground before anything moves

This is the step that protects your claim, and it has a deadline built into it: it has to happen before the tree is cut up and hauled away. Once the tree is gone, so is the proof of what hit you and how. Shoot photos and video from the ground and from upstairs windows — never from the roof — and capture:

• The tree itself: the whole trunk or limb, where it came from, and the point where it meets the roof.
• The impact from several angles — wide enough to show the house, close enough to show the break.
• Every interior room affected: ceilings, walls, floors, and any furniture or belongings under the damage.
• The sky through the hole, if there is one, so the opening is documented from inside.
• Standing water, soaked insulation, and any electrical fixtures sitting in the wet area.

Notify your insurer, mitigate reasonably, and sign nothing broad

Call your carrier's claim line and open the claim as your policy directs. Homeowners policies typically cover reasonable steps you take to stop further damage — a tarp, boarding a broken window, pulling a rug out of standing water — so keep every receipt for anything you spend limiting the spread. Typically is not always: check your policy or ask the adjuster what your specific coverage allows before you lay out money.

Two things to refuse, however the pitch is framed. Do not sign an Assignment of Benefits, which hands your claim proceeds to a contractor and takes you out of your own claim. Do not sign a contract with a blank or open scope of work — the scope and the price go in writing before you sign, not after. The full claims playbook, from the adjuster meeting through a low first offer, is on our storm damage and insurance claims page.

One detail specific to tree jobs: removing the tree and repairing the roof are different trades, and your policy may treat them as separate line items handled by separate contractors. A tree service takes the tree off and out; a licensed roofer rebuilds what it broke. Don't assume one crew both fells the tree and frames the roof, and don't let a tree company talk you into structural roof work it isn't licensed to do.

What happens next: structure before shingles

Here's why the roof isn't fixed the day after. A tree strike is a framing event, not a shingle event, so the work runs from the inside out. Before any weight goes back on the roof — before shingles, before even some tarps — the structure underneath gets evaluated. Cracked rafters, a split ridge, or crushed decking have to be found and made sound first, or the new roof is being built on a broken frame.

For a significant impact, that evaluation sometimes calls for a licensed structural engineer, and structural work pulls a construction permit under the New Jersey Uniform Construction Code (N.J.A.C. 5:23) — unlike a like-for-like shingle swap, which doesn't. It's also why tarping sometimes has to wait: you can't safely cover a section that has to be opened up and re-framed. The roof is rebuilt from the deck up after the framing is repaired, not before.

Once the structure is sound and the roof is back on, it's worth documenting the whole roof, not just the patch. A tree that hits one slope can loosen shingles and lift flashing several feet from the point of impact. A Roof Health Assessment puts the repaired area and the rest of the roof into one written report with a Roof Health Score, so you know the sections the tree didn't obviously hit actually came through intact.

Right now, before anything else

If a tree is on your house as you read this: get everyone out from under it, stay clear of any downed wire and call 911 if you see one, and don't go up to look. Once people are safe, photograph everything from the ground, then call for stabilization. We're reachable for emergencies day and night at (973) 337-9001, or through our contact page once the immediate danger has passed.