After the storm: tree emergency triage, and what an assistant never says.

A tree touching or bringing down a line is not a tree job until the utility has made the line safe. So the assistant's first rule has no exceptions: a message that mentions wires gets the owner's approved wording, which tells the customer to stay away, assume the line is live, and call emergency services and the utility. Nothing in that reply offers a crew.

Below that rule, the assistant sorts every other message under three headings the owner wrote, life-safety, structure-impact and routine, and drafts email replies the owner sends. It never judges a tree's condition, never says anything is safe and never gives a time. Phone handling is a separate system, covered in the article on missed-call workflows.

FirstEnergy's downed-line safety page, as checked on 16 October 2026, tells people who see a downed power line to call 911, to assume any downed or low-hanging line is energized, and to stay at least thirty feet from downed distribution lines and a hundred feet from transmission lines. It warns that an energized line may not spark, smoke or make any noise. LG&E and KU, based in Louisville, Kentucky, add that there is no way to tell whether a downed wire is a power line or a cable or telephone wire, and urge care when clearing limbs that may touch one.

Eugene Water & Electric Board in Oregon says fifty feet. Distances and reporting numbers differ by utility, so the wire wording carries the figure and number from the customer's own utility's page. The crew side is federal OSHA's (Oregon and Kentucky run their own State Plans, which must be at least as effective): its tree care hazard card tells supervisors to assume all power lines are energized and to keep work at least ten feet away, or have the power company de-energize and ground the line. Whether a crew goes near a line is settled by the owner, the crew lead and the utility.

The wording is the owner's, drafted with Aevrion where the owner asks, checked against the utility's page and saved in a skill as fixed text. A lasting rule the triage Bot has been told to remember says any mention of a wire, line, cable, spark or pole gets that text and goes to the top of the queue. Grok Bot's documentation has durable rules given in chat for the Bot to remember, but a remembered rule is guidance rather than a lock, so the owner reads every wire draft before it goes.

An illustration of its shape, not a script to copy: stay well away from the tree and the wire and keep others away; assume the line is live even if it is silent; call 911 and report the line to the utility, in the order and on the numbers the customer's own utility gives; the company cannot work near a line until the utility has made it safe, and will be in touch once the customer says the utility has attended. No time, no reassurance, no price.

One honest limit: a draft helps nobody at two in the morning while the owner sleeps, so the wire instruction also belongs on the website's storm notice and in whatever answers the company's phone, separate systems the owner controls.

Based on the Grok Bot documentation at docs.x.ai as checked on 15 October 2026. Its statements on Bot rules, Bot-to-Bot messaging, routine triggers, connected apps, approval expiry and payments were rechecked against docs.x.ai and Cursor's help pages on 26 October 2026. The trade examples are Aevrion's illustrations, not documented Grok Bot use cases. Aevrion Ops is an independent consultancy. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or a partner of xAI, SpaceXSI or Cursor. Grok Bot is named here only to describe it.

The headings and the words that trigger them are the owner's, fixed before storm season. The Bot sorts by what the customer said, not by its own reading of a photo. If a picture seems to show something worse than the words, the Bot flags it and the higher heading stands; it never moves a message down.

The Federal Trade Commission's advice on scams after weather emergencies (updated September 2025, checked on 16 October 2026) warns homeowners to be wary of anyone promising immediate clean-up or repairs. The owner's lasting rules ban these from every reply:

• ARRIVAL

  Any time or window, such as tonight or first thing. Only the owner gives a time, once the crew's work is decided.

• SAFETY

  Any statement that a tree, limb, room or driveway is safe, stable or will be fine. That is the arborist's judgment on site.

• INSTRUCTIONS

  Any advice to touch, move or cut anything near the tree, beyond the fixed wire wording.

• MONEY

  Prices, deposits or requests for payment, and anything about what insurance will cover.

• SPEED

  Words like immediately or right away, which promise what a careful crew may not deliver.

The triage Bot reads the folder or mailbox the owner gives it; routing web-form entries there is a custom integration, tested first. The documentation describes no telephony, so the Bot neither takes calls nor sends texts. During a storm watch the owner switches on a routine that sorts new messages every fifteen minutes, above the documented five-minute minimum between scheduled runs.

1. 1

   Captured

   Owner

   Nobody yet: the message sits in the owner's intake folder

   Advances when

   The next routine run picks it up

   Ends when

   Never ends here; an unread message is the failure this model exists to show

2. 2

   Sorted

   Owner

   The triage Bot

   Advances when

   The Bot files it under a heading and drafts the reply from the owner's wording

3. 3

   Waiting to send

   Owner

   The owner

   Advances when

   The owner edits, sends or discards the draft in the Bot's conversation

4. 4

   Assessed

   Owner

   The arborist, on site or from photos

   Advances when

   The arborist decides what the job is and how urgent it is

5. 5

   Scheduled or closed

   Owner

   The owner

   Advances when

   The owner books the crew and tells the customer a time

   Ends when

   Closed when the job is done or the customer declines

An approval raised by a routine nobody started by hand expires after about ten minutes (Cursor's help pages say thirty) and the step does not run, so the triage routine needs no approvals: it sorts and drafts, and sending is always the owner's act. The documentation offers no automatic retry and no failure alert; each storm morning, the owner looks over the routine's recent runs. Designing routines that fail visibly is the subject of the reliable-workflows pillar.

Portland, Oregon's guidance on emergency tree removals, as checked on 16 October 2026, describes an immediate hazard as a tree that suddenly starts uprooting, with cracks in the soil, or suddenly starts splitting where the main branches join the trunk, with fresh sapwood showing. If there is time for the normal permit process, it is not immediate, and dead trees often are not. The response must be proportional: a broken limb on a sound tree may justify pruning that limb, not removal. Only the hazardous portion may come down before a permit; a regulated tree removed in an emergency needs a retroactive permit application within seven days, with photographs or other documentation such as an arborist's report, and if the inspector finds no emergency existed the removal is a violation.

England has a parallel exception for protected trees: urgent work to remove an immediate risk of serious harm needs written notice to the authority as soon as practicable after the work becomes necessary, and only the work needed to remove the risk.

In both places, whether there was an emergency is the arborist's judgment first and the authority's decision after. The triage record helps by staying intact: the customer's words and photos with their arrival times, and the reply sent. The Bot attaches it to the job and tracks the seven-day date; the arborist's own site photos and notes, or a report, support it, and the owner files.

Scoring needs one workflow named, and here it is storm-message triage. The ungated workflow automation readiness assessment rates it on twelve fixed dimensions and gives one of four results on the spot, from not ready yet to high-leverage candidate, alongside the blockers and a next step. If the headings, the trigger words and the wire wording are not yet written, rule clarity will be low, and a low score on rule clarity, ownership clarity or security and compliance readiness caps the result. Rightly so: an unwritten rule cannot be handed to an assistant.

Who decides what, and when an assistant may act at all, is covered in the article on giving an AI agent authority. Once the headings exist on paper, the contact page is the way to ask Aevrion Ops about turning them into a triage Bot's lasting rules, its fixed wire reply and a tested storm-watch routine.

1. A message about a tree on wires gets the owner's fixed wording: stay away, assume the line is live, call emergency services and the utility. It never gets a crew.
2. Utilities' distances differ, so the wording uses the customer's own utility's figure; OSHA tells tree crews to assume every line is energized.
3. The owner fixes three headings in advance, life-safety, structure-impact and routine, and a message only ever moves up.
4. No draft gives an arrival time, calls a tree safe, asks for money or promises immediate clean-up.
5. Emergency removals can still need a permit afterwards; Portland asks for a retroactive application within seven days, and the triage record helps the owner build it.