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I have heard that some oaks drop limbs as a way of keeping competition at bay. Limbs drop and crush vegetation around it.

was there any interior rotting involved.... or was it crotch angle and included bark ?

thank God it was out in the prairie ... eh???

Wow! You all dodged a bullet there; thank all the gods that no one was on that driveway.

No rotting Ken. Just 40 years of growth at an ill concerived angle. The branch broke about 5 feet from its 'V' off the trunk.

If the tree was trimmed improperly at some point (which happens more frequently than you might think) it weakens the tree and improves the odds of that happening. It's best to only have a certified arborist trim your trees.

Deanna

Wow! Yeah the tornado last year hit me in NE Oklahoma too. Luckily, except one tiny spot about 50'x30' which happened to be right in the middle of my backyard garden, it didn't touch ground, just destroyed the tops of all my trees. Thank God, after years of procrastinating, just the winter before I'd paid an arborist a good chunk of cash to come out and seriously thin all dead wood and such from those, and some branches to restore me some sun, or I'd have gotten more than a gigantic branch from my sweet gum slammed through my brand new porch door. But in the garden -- barely missing by about two feet, a very big un-mortared cinderblock setup that would have been really bad added to that swirling -- it twisted a well-anchored tall metal garden arbor structure into a total pretzel, tore the wood fence behind all my cattlepanel trellising arches into many pieces, and "sucked up" the ground UNDER the black mat of the ground area that had been hard and solid for 17 years. Now there's this bizarre mini-mountain mounds of the softest dirt ever underneath it. I'm fixing to go rip up weeds and cut out all the mat so I can level the ground and reapply it. Suction, so weird!

PJ