Few things are as persuasive or compelling as good statistics. Take car safety as an example.
Simply telling someone that driving is a dangerous activity won’t move the needle very much. But if you explain that there are roughly 700 car accidents every hour, you’ll have a much better chance of convincing this same person to take driving safety seriously.
The same principle works in the tree-care industry, especially when the statistics you use relate to safety. So, to ensure you’re better prepared to communicate with your clients (and your crew), we’ve rounded up some of the most eye-catching statistics we can find that relate to tree safety.
13 Tree Safety Facts & Figures Tree Care Professionals Should Know
The following stats should prove helpful in a variety of situations, but be sure to cite your sources (or simply link to this page) if you include them in any published content.
1. Approximately 31 people die from wind-related tree failures in the U.S. every year.
You already know that strong winds can rip trees apart or cause them to fail completely, triggering unthinkable damage in the process. But unfortunately, many homeowners fail to appreciate the threat windthrow or falling branches can present, so they leave hazardous trees standing and unpruned, putting their home and family at risk.
However, a statistic like this helps to illustrate the stakes of the situation and reinforce the fact that strong winds don’t only cause untold amounts of property damage; they also cause a significant number of annual deaths, amounting to nearly one every 10 days.
2. About 80 tree-care workers die on the job each year.
You probably already appreciate the level of danger that’s involved in tree-care work, but that doesn’t mean your clients or crew do. Unfortunately, many consider the dangers involved with tree-care work to be on par with those facing landscapers.
But if you explain the surprisingly high number of tree-care workers who die on the job each year, it helps correct those mistaken assumptions. And if you need to be even more persuasive, explain that this fatality rate is 10 times higher than the average U.S. job. In fact, tree-care work is even more dangerous than police work or commercial fishing.
3. Falls are only responsible for about 34% of tree-care worker injuries.
Your climbers undoubtedly understand the importance of things like proper rigging techniques and equipment inspections. No one wants to fall out of a tree, and the dangers of doing so are plainly obvious. But it’s important for everyone on your crew to understand that most jobsite injuries aren’t caused by falls.
By ensuring that your crew understands the hazards presented by chainsaws, chippers, stump grinders, and even loppers, you can help keep every member of your team focused on safety. This, in turn, will help keep crew injuries to an absolute minimum.
4. Trees with full canopies experience up to four times the drag force that those with no leaves do.
Sometimes, clients are lulled into a sense of false security based on the time of year. Consider an obviously declining 80-foot oak growing right over a property owner’s home. You know the tree needs to come down, but the homeowner remains unconvinced — it survived two different severe storms in the last month; why won’t it survive the next?
But because it’s currently February, and the oak is completely devoid of leaves, you know that this tree’s luck may run out as soon as it leafs out and the spring storms roll in. By explaining that it’ll soon start experiencing up to four times as much force from the wind, you’ll have a better chance of illustrating the risks it may soon present.
5. A 60-mile-per-hour wind creates four times as much force as a 30-mile-per-hour wind does.
Wind strength is one of those things that’s hard for people to grasp. For example, a weather report predicting winds of up to 30 miles per hour won’t trigger much concern in the average person, until you explain that winds of even 25 miles per hour can make walking difficult, according to the Beaufort Wind Scale.
People also tend to underestimate how quickly the force of wind grows with increasing wind speed. That’s because the force the wind creates doesn’t just increase linearly — it squares. In other words, a 60-mile-per-hour wind isn’t twice as strong as a 30-mile-per-hour wind; it creates four times as much force.
6. Tree care pros can be up to 94% accurate with failure predictions.
Homeowners and property managers are sometimes skeptical of the predictions and risk assessments arborists make, often feeling as though they’re alarmist or profit-motivated. But in actuality, tree risk assessors are often quite accurate in determining the relative risk a tree presents.
To help determine how accurate risk assessors could be, scientists analyzed two years of risk assessments carried out on five different properties and then compared them with the actual fate of trees following Hurricane Mathew in 2016. In total, 94% of trees assessed as being at imminent risk of failure suffered damage.
7. 52% of urban forestry programs reported claims related to tree failures.
Analyzing tree failure after storms can be helpful for quantifying the risks trees present, but this approach suffers from a pretty big issue: Many trees that fail during storms were never even considered for removal, as they didn’t pose a threat to any people or property.
So, it’s often helpful to consider multiple lines of evidence, such as the percentage of urban forestry programs that received claims for injuries or property damage. This helps provide a yardstick that decision makers can use to understand the risks trees can present.
8. Saturated soils can reduce root anchoring strength by 50% or more.
As an experienced arborist, you know that it’s not only important to assess trees but also the surrounding site as well. You want to know if nearby trees have been recently removed or if the property owner has had construction work carried out recently. And, of course, you’ll also want to check out the soil supporting potentially hazardous trees.
But this is the kind of thing very few homeowners understand. So, by explaining just how dangerous saturated soils can be, it can help you illustrate the danger an otherwise healthy-looking tree may present.
9. Woodchippers are involved in roughly 1 in 8 tree-care worker fatalities
Chippers may not cause as many injuries as chainsaws, but the injuries they do cause are often quite severe. Analyses of U.S. tree-care worker deaths show that about 13% of fatal incidents involve workers being caught, pulled, or dragged into a wood-chipping machine.
This information can certainly be helpful when trying to get your crew to take chipper safety seriously, but it can also be useful with homeowners. Just share these statistics the next time a homeowner is considering renting a chipper and handling post-removal debris cleanup themselves in an effort to save a few hundred bucks.
10. A 10-foot-long, 24-inch-diameter limb may weigh more than 1 ton.
People who don’t work with trees every day rarely understand exactly how heavy branches can be. This leads them to underestimate the relative danger posed by a limb hanging over homes, sidewalks, or other high-traffic areas. But by sharing an easy-to-digest figure like this, you can help illustrate the gravity of the situation.
Now, a 24-inch limb is certainly not small, so it can be helpful to have some similarly impressive numbers at the ready when dealing with smaller branches. For example, a 5-foot-long, 6-inch-thick branch may weigh 50 pounds or more. That doesn’t sound like much until you consider it could be falling from 50 feet above the ground or more.
11. Residential roofs are only designed to support 20 to 30 pounds per square foot.
Speaking of falling limbs, many homeowners have a false sense of security regarding the relative protection their roof provides. While roofs usually shield a home’s occupants from rain, hail, and relatively small woody debris, they simply aren’t designed to stand up to the kinds of extreme forces falling branches unleash.
Even the small, 50-pound limb we discussed previously can produce more force than a roof can sustain, depending on the exact manner and height from which it falls. And obviously, a 1-ton behemoth will all but destroy a residential roof.
12. Approximately 100 people are injured by chainsaws every day.
Whether they’re dealing with debris after a storm or have a tree that needs to be pruned, many homeowners decide to take tree care into their own hands. You already know that this is generally a bad idea, but it can be tricky to explain exactly why. Fortunately, safety issues provide a pretty good starting point.
And because most tree-care work requires the use of a chainsaw — something very few homeowners have been properly trained to operate — it can be helpful to not only explain that 100 or so people are injured by a chainsaw every day but also that 75% to 80% of these injuries occur in non-professionals.
13. Ladders lead to more than 300,000 emergency room visits each year.
One of the other problems related to homeowners tackling tree-care duties is the elevation factor: Tree work often takes place above the ground. And because homeowners don’t typically have ropes and harnesses on hand (never mind the training to use them), they often use ladders to access the upper portions of a tree.
Simply explaining there is a reason tree-care pros don’t use ladders is rarely enough, but when you point out that ladders send more than 800 people to the ER each day (including many who’re using ladders for safer work than tree care), your clients may be more willing to listen.
Let Orb Tree Service Marketing Help You Leverage These Statistics
These kinds of statistics can be quite helpful when discussing tree-care services in person with your clients, but they can also be helpful to incorporate into your website copy or printed materials. They can even provide SEO value in your quest to achieve the online visibility your business needs.
The trick is incorporating them in a way that maximizes their value and boosts your authority. That’s exactly the kind of thing Orb Tree Service Marketing can help with.
We help tree-care companies expand their reach, attract new clients, and fill their calendar with profitable work — in short, we help them grow. Contact us today to set up a call with our CEO and find out how our approach can help take your business to entirely new heights.
Sources & References
- Los Justicieros – “How Many Car Accidents Every Minute, Every Day, Every Year in the United States”
An informational article presenting aggregated statistics on the frequency of motor vehicle accidents in the U.S.
https://losjusticieros.com/news%26updates/how-many-car-accidents-every-minute-every-day-every-year-united-states/ - Springer – “A Probabilistic Approach to Understanding Disaster Risk”
A peer-reviewed research article offering a probabilistic framework for assessing disaster risk and implications for mitigation strategies.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11069-008-9314-7 - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – “Motor Vehicle Crash Deaths — United States, 2008–2012”
A CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report presenting analyzed data on motor vehicle crash fatalities and trends.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/wk/mm5815.pdf - JSTOR – “Age and Reaction Time in Long-Term Driving Performance”
A scholarly article examining the relationship between driver age and reaction time and its implications for road safety.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23692362 - NASA Glenn Research Center – “The Effect of Drag on Flight”
An educational resource explaining aerodynamic drag and its impact on aircraft performance.
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/VirtualAero/BottleRocket/airplane/drageq.html?pubDate=20250522 - ScienceDirect – “Experimental Analysis of Flight Dynamics in Low Reynolds Number Regimes”
A scientific research article investigating aerodynamic characteristics and experimental flight dynamics under low Reynolds number conditions.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1618866720300108 - International Society of Arboriculture (ISA) / Arboriculture & Urban Forestry – “Tree Risk Assessment and Management”
A peer-reviewed arboriculture paper focused on methodologies for assessing and managing tree risk in urban environments.
https://auf.isa-arbor.com/content/isa/45/1/26.full.pdf - Springer – “Soil Ecology and Function: Plant Interactions in Changing Environments”
A scientific article discussing plant–soil interactions, ecosystem function, and environmental response.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11104-022-05613-z - ScienceDirect – “Cognitive Factors Influencing Human Performance in Complex Systems”
A research article exploring psychological and cognitive influences on human performance in system operations.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022437524001452 - Omni – “Lumber Weight Calculator”
An online calculator resource used to estimate the weight of lumber based on species, dimensions, and moisture content.
https://www.omnicalculator.com/construction/lumber-weight - Roofer Digest – “How Much Weight Can a Roof Hold?”
An informational article explaining typical load-bearing capacities for residential roofs and factors influencing structural strength.
https://rooferdigest.com/how-much-weight-can-a-roof-hold/ - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – “Chainsaw Safety Tips for Natural Disasters and Home Projects”
A safety guidance page offering recommended precautions for using chainsaws to prevent injuries.
https://www.cdc.gov/natural-disasters/safety/chain-saw-safety.html - Zipdo – “Ladder Safety Statistics”
A statistics overview detailing data on ladder-related injuries, risk factors, and safety considerations.
https://zipdo.co/ladder-safety-statistics/ - National Weather Service – “Beaufort Wind Scale”
An official meteorological glossary entry explaining the Beaufort wind force scale, its historical origin, and how it’s used to estimate and report wind speed based on observed conditions.
https://forecast.weather.gov/glossary.php?word=beaufort+scale
