Thank you Arktrees! I'm sure some yards LOOK like they've been through a hurricane and it is different than just normal pruning since there are trees with a good portion of their crowns missing, split limbs, etc.

Welcome to the Ozarks forum.

Did you lose any trees in your yard?

Here is a link that might be useful: Restoring trees after a hurricane

My original message in this forum is a copy and paste of a message that I posted in the "Trees" forum. Someone suggested that it be posted here, and I had not though of that, so I did. Anyway hopefully it will help save a mature tree or two that would otherwise be lost.

We personally lost no trees as they are all young and in the ground for a couple years, therefore small and had little to no damage. The worst of it was a blackgum that has been in the ground for a few months. It was bent to the ground about 24" above soil line, but it has since stood back up, with a mild lean (it has been staked for this year to try to help correct).

I'm near Fayetteville, and in Fayetteville it is nasty, and I know it was worse elsewhere. I know people who have totally lost multiple large mature trees. There are old sugar maples around where I work that are basically trunks with stubs of limbs 6-7 feet, and birch/willows are just shattered toothpicks. Trees that have not experienced an ice storm like that, or they would not have grown in the form that they did. Fayetteville is at around 1200+ feet elevation, and since the cold air is very shallow during an ice storm, often project up through to air just warm enough to save the area from the storms have have occurred nearby in recent years. But not this time. We were lucky in that our temperature rose to 32F for 4-5 hours during the day during heavy rain. This did not allow melting, but did basically stop accumulation during that time. There was still severe damage. Nothing like stepping out at night with no power and hearing large limbs, and trunks fracturing around you about every 15-20 seconds or so, it's not something I'll soon forget.However 3-4 miles one direction and there is relatively little damage, and 1-2 miles the other way is even worse destruction. I just look around and wonder how and if many will recover. It's rather depressing.

Hopefully some good will come to those affected.

Arktrees

I noticed my young trees fared pretty well too. We have a bur oak about 8 to 10 feet tall that didn't have any broken limbs. There's a huge oak down the road that I'm sure is a bur oak and it lost some very large limbs. It was such a beautiful tree and very old. It had such a nice shape and I don't think it will ever look that good again. It's in a field that isn't maintained so no trimming was done. It still has hanging limbs. Very sad.