Before you call

How this works

This page lays out exactly what happens when you call the number on this site, who you end up talking to, what to have in front of you, and how this site makes money. There is nothing clever going on. It is worth reading once so there are no surprises, whether your tree is an emergency or a job you can schedule.

What this site is

Placerville Emergency Tree Removal is a referral service. It is not a tree company. There is no crew here, no trucks, no chippers, and no cranes, and nothing on this site is going to pretend otherwise.

What it does is connect people in El Dorado County who have a tree problem with a licensed, insured tree service that works this county. That crew carries its own insurance, sets its own prices, does its own scheduling, and stands behind its own work. When you hire them, your agreement is with them and not with this site. The reason a site like this exists is that good tree crews are usually better at dropping a dead pine than at showing up on Google, and the pages here are written to be genuinely useful whether you ever call or not.

What to have ready when you call

None of this is required, and in a real emergency you should just call. But a call goes much faster and a crew can triage better with a few things in front of you:

• Where you are. Your town and roughly where in the county, from the oak country around Cameron Park up to the pines above Pollock Pines. Distance and terrain both affect the job.
• What the tree is doing. Is it down across the driveway, leaning toward the house, dead and standing, hung up in another tree, snapped and caught over a line, or just crowding the roof and due for a trim.
• Rough size and species. A guess is fine. Tall pine, big oak, twenty feet or sixty. Species and size are most of what decides how the crew shows up and what it costs, which the cost page covers.
• What it is threatening. A structure, a road, a power line, a fence, or nothing yet. This is the triage question. A tree on the house or blocking the only way out moves ahead of a tree that is already down and not threatening anything.
• Access notes. A long or steep driveway, a locked gate, a tight backyard with no equipment access, a hillside lot, soft ground. Access is often the single biggest surprise on a quote, so flag it up front.

How we get paid

The crews we refer compensate us for the referral. You do not pay anything to this site, and the referral does not add anything to your bill. The price you agree to with the tree service is the price.

The obvious question is whether that biases what you read here, so here is the honest answer. It creates a pull toward telling you that you need work done now. We have tried to write against that pull rather than pretend it does not exist. The cost page publishes real local ranges instead of asking you to call for pricing, and it flatly refuses to put a number on a tree on a house sight unseen, because that job depends entirely on access, crane need, and utility involvement. The same page tells you to deal with dead and hazard trees before they fail, precisely to avoid the 50 to 100 percent emergency premium that we would otherwise profit from. And the site says plainly that it does not do tree appraisals or oak reports. A referral service that sends crews on calls that waste everyone's time does not stay in business, because the crews stop answering. Honest information and a working business point the same direction here.

What we do not do: sell your number to a list, pass it to five companies who all call you back, or add a fee on top of the crew's price.

What happens when you call

The number on this site is a tracking number. It rings through to a tree service working in El Dorado County, and that tracking is how the crew knows the call came from here. Calls may be recorded for that purpose, and if a call is being recorded you will hear a short announcement at the start and can hang up if you would rather not be.

You are talking to a tree crew, not a call center reading a script, which means they can answer a real question about your tree and it also means they might be up in a bucket when you ring. In a big storm, when every tree in the county seems to fail the same night, expect a queue. If nobody picks up, leave a message with your town and what the tree is doing, and the most urgent, threatening situations get called back first.

What the visit looks like

For anything but the most obvious emergency, the crew should look at the tree before quoting a firm price. Height gets the attention, but the trunk diameter, the species, what is underneath the tree, and how the crew and their equipment get to it are what actually decide the job, and none of that comes across in a phone description. Expect the estimator to walk the tree, look at the lean and the load, check the ground and the access, and note anything overhead like a service line before putting a number in writing. The tree removal page covers how a crew reads a tree.

On the work itself, a tree under tension is taken apart in a specific order so it releases where the crew wants it to, not where gravity and a bad cut would send it. On a hazard tree over a structure that often means roping limbs down piece by piece, or bringing in a bucket truck or a crane rather than climbing a brittle dead pine. If you asked to keep the wood or have the stump ground, that gets settled up front so it is part of the number you agree to.

Trees on power lines

This one has its own rule because it is where people get hurt. If a tree is on a power line, or a line is down in the mess, stay well back and treat every wire as live, keep people and pets away, and call it in. A tree tangled in electric lines is not a job to start before the utility has made it safe, and a responsible crew will coordinate with PG&E rather than risk it. The sequence matters, and the crew handles it. The emergency page goes into storm and hazard work in more detail.

What we do not do

There are no reviews on this site, no testimonials, no photos of a team, and no address, because a referral service has none of those to show honestly and every one would have to be invented. The prices here are typical El Dorado County ranges for planning, not quotes, gathered so you can tell whether a number you are told is reasonable. And the scope is a tree crew's scope: removal, trimming, stumps, hazard and dead tree work, and defensible space clearing. It does not include tree appraisals, oak technical reports, arborist reports, landscaping, or milling. More on the site itself is on the about page.