With budget cuts came a change is policy: contracted crews would prune more in hopes of not having to respond to as many downed limbs and trees.

There were two notable cases where large trees came crashing down in Wednesday's wind, but, Linda Tucker with the city's Department of Transportation, says there were fewer  than 20 calls for service.  She says the relatively low number is proof the new prevention model of pruning is far more effective than the old reaction model.

TUCKER:"We've taken a different approach to maintaining our 100,000 public trees and that is that we go proactively pruning neighborhood by neighborhood."

It used to take city crews 10 years to prune the entire city service call by service call.  Contract crews recently finished pruning the city in about three years.  They will now start all over again