Preparing Your Trees for Indiana Ice Storms and Spring Wind

By the Fort Wayne Tree Pros team · May 21, 2026

If you’ve lived in Fort Wayne through more than a couple of winters, you’ve seen what an ice storm can do. Heavy, glazed ice doubles the weight on every branch and shatters limbs that would have ridden out a 50 mph wind no problem. And spring brings its own version — straight-line winds and tornadic storms that come through Allen County most years.

Storm damage isn’t fully preventable. But proactive tree care can drastically reduce it. Here’s what to do before the weather hits.

1. Get a Real Inspection of Your Big Trees

Before storm season, walk your property and look up. You’re looking for:

• Dead limbs, especially over the house, garage, or driveway
• Limbs with cracks at the attachment point
• Two trunks growing tightly together with bark wedged in between (“included bark”) — these are very prone to splitting in ice and wind
• Hanging branches caught in the canopy from previous storms
• Branches rubbing against the house, roof, or power lines

If you have any of these on a mature tree near a structure, getting them out before winter is one of the best investments you can make.

2. Have Heavy or Overextended Limbs Reduced

“Crown reduction” is the technique of selectively shortening long, heavy branches without ruining the tree’s shape. It’s especially valuable for:

• Silver maples (very prone to ice damage)
• Bradford and Cleveland pears (notorious for splitting in storms)
• Willows
• Hackberries with long horizontal limbs
• Any tree with a limb sticking way out past the rest of the canopy

The goal is to shorten the lever arm. A 30-foot horizontal limb catches a lot of wind and ice. The same limb reduced to 22 feet rides out storms much better.

3. Thin Out Dense Canopies (Carefully)

A dense, overgrown canopy catches more wind and ice than a properly thinned one. Selective thinning — removing crossing, rubbing, and weakly attached branches — lets wind pass through the canopy instead of pushing the whole tree like a sail.

Important: this is not the same as “topping” or “lion-tailing” (stripping all the small branches off the inside and leaving just tufts at the ends). Both of those weaken the tree and make storm damage worse. A real arborist thins evenly throughout the canopy.

4. Cable High-Value Trees with Structural Weakness

For a heritage tree with a co-dominant trunk you don’t want to lose, steel cables installed high in the canopy by a qualified arborist can hold the two leaders together through wind and ice. Cabling is invisible from the ground and can save the tree for decades.

5. Watch for Soil and Root Problems Around the Base

Most major windthrow (whole trees falling over) happens because of root problems, not trunk problems. Look for:

• Recent construction or trenching near a mature tree (driveways, fences, foundations)
• Soggy or saturated ground around the trunk
• Visible root rot (mushrooms, soft wood at the root flare)
• Any sign the tree has moved — cracks in the soil, lifted roots on one side

A healthy crown on a tree with bad roots is a setup for failure in the next big wind event.

6. Don’t Forget Power Lines

AEP/Indiana Michigan Power trims trees in their right-of-way along streets, but they don’t come onto your property to trim limbs growing over the service line that runs from the pole to your house. Those are your responsibility — and they’re a leading cause of outages and house fires in ice storms.

If you have limbs over the service drop, get them removed by an experienced crew (never DIY around power lines).

7. Plant for the Future

If you’re replacing trees lost to storms or to EAB, think about wind and ice resistance:

• Good ice resistance: Bur oak, white oak, swamp white oak, hackberry, sweetgum, ginkgo, Kentucky coffee tree
• Poor ice resistance (avoid near houses): Silver maple, Bradford pear, Siberian elm, honeylocust thornless cultivars, willow

Pre-Storm Walk-Throughs

If you have mature trees near your home or business in Fort Wayne and would like a pre-storm-season assessment, we’ll come walk your property and give you a free, written list of what we’d recommend — in priority order. You can hire us, hire someone else, or DIY the easy stuff. Either way you’ll know what’s coming.