Storm Damage Clean-Up Across Shellharbour City

Before anything else: what not to walk under

The dangerous part of a storm is rarely the branch already on the lawn. It is the one that split, swung, and is now sitting in a fork twenty feet up with nothing holding it but friction — and a body underneath it.

So the first job on a Shellharbour block after a blow is standing back and looking up.

• Powerlines beat everything. Stay 8 metres clear of any downed or sagging wire, assume it is live even if the street is dark, never drive over one, and call Endeavour Energy on 131 003 — they run the network across Shellharbour and the Illawarra (Endeavour Energy — report a fault or hazard).
• Tree on a house, a car, or a person: NSW SES 132 500. Life-threatening, 000.
• Do not tug the limb. Hung-up branches and bent-over saplings are storing energy. Pulling on one is how people get hurt hours after the wind has stopped.
• Photograph it before you touch it. Wide shots, close shots, the damage, the tree base. You will want them for the insurer, and Shellharbour City Council asks for photographic evidence when a storm-damaged tree is put forward for removal.

Then call someone with a saw, a rope and a plan.

Why trees fail the way they do here

Shellharbour cops weather from two directions and the trees know it.

The southerly buster comes up the coast in summer with a wind shift so abrupt that canopies loaded one way get slammed the other. That reversal is what snaps codominant forks and tears out limbs that had been fine for thirty years. East coast lows in autumn and winter are the other pattern — days of rain first, then wind. Saturated ground plus wind is the classic recipe for whole-tree windthrow, because the roots let go before the trunk does.

Geography sharpens it. The exposed western and southern edges of Lake Illawarra, the open ground around Bass Point Reserve and Killalea, and the newer estates at Shell Cove and Flinders have very little shelter — trees there grow into the wind and get no practice at anything else. Inland, the escarpment behind Albion Park funnels and accelerates westerlies down onto Albion Park Rail and Tullimbar. And the sandy, free-draining soils near the coast give shallower anchorage than the heavier clays further up the valley.

Species matter too. Cocos palms shed heavy fronds and whole seed heads. Camphor laurel — a weed tree across this district — grows fast, holds a huge sail of leaf and has notoriously weak unions. Norfolk Island pines along the older coastal streets drop big lateral limbs. Blackbutt and swamp mahogany are heavy timber; when one of those lets go, it does real damage on the way down.

The three jobs after a storm, and how each is worked

Storm work sorts into three shapes, and they are not equally risky.

1. The hung-up limb. Broken but still up there, resting in the canopy or caught in a fork. Nobody climbs above a hanger. It gets accessed from a neighbouring stem or an EWP where there is room, roped before it is cut, and lowered under control into a marked drop zone on the ground. The area underneath is closed off first — that means the path, the clothesline, the pool surround and the neighbour's side of the fence if the swing could reach it.

2. The partial failure. The tree is still standing but has a split fork, a torn limb collar, or a fresh lean with cracked and heaved soil on the uphill side. Sometimes the fix is removing the damaged section and keeping the tree. Often the root plate has already moved and the tree is finished. That is an inspection call on the day, not something anyone can promise over the phone.

3. The tree that is already down. Windthrown or snapped, lying across a fence, a shed, a driveway or a roof. The rule is to cut it in the right order. A trunk lying under tension across a fence line will spring when it is severed in the wrong place. It gets relieved section by section, with the load taken by rigging or by the machine rather than by whoever is holding the saw.

On tight Shellharbour blocks — the narrow side accesses through Mount Warrigal, Barrack Heights and older Warilla — none of this is drop-and-drag. Sections come out over the fence or through the house-side gap by hand, which is slower and is the honest reason storm work is not cheap.

What is left behind, and what comes next

The debris goes. Limbs chipped, timber cut and loaded, the yard raked and blown so you are not finding sticks in the lawn for a month. If you want the chip kept as mulch on your beds, say so and it stays; otherwise everything is hauled off — see green waste removal.

Where the tree cannot be saved, the follow-on is tree removal, or dangerous and difficult tree removal when what is left is leaning over a roof or a pool and needs to come down in pieces. Once the stump is all that remains, stump grinding takes it below turf level so the yard can go back to normal.

And after the mess is sorted, it is worth walking the rest of the garden. The trees that survived this storm are the ones that will be tested by the next. Deadwooding and a sensible crown thin — see tree pruning — is the cheapest storm insurance there is.

Get it looked at

Storm jobs are quoted on site because nobody can price a hung-up limb from a description. Tell us what happened, where it is and what it is sitting on, and we will connect you with a local crew who can come and look.

Coverage runs right across the LGA — see suburbs we service — and there is more on the whole range of work on the home page. We ask the crews we work with to carry their own public liability cover; ask to see the certificate before work begins, and take your own photos first for the insurer.

Call (02) 4214 4566 for storm damage clean-up in Shellharbour.