Early last evening, we got hit by a very sudden storm. We heard what we thought was lightning very close to us.
Found out later, it wasn’t lightning. It was a 100 foot pine tree crashing into our driveway.
It smashed the front and rear windshields of our old Saturn and one branch seems to have damaged the hood. Our Hyundai, parked behind it, doesn’t seem to be hurt.
There was also damage to the house. An attic window was smashed, as was one in our basement where I have my office. A bookcase was broken and is covered with glass.
The tree also seems to have smashed our garbage carts.
The insurance company sent someone over to board up the windows, and will be assessing the car damage (assuming they can get near enough to see it – I have to get approval to pay for the tree removal).
I was going to be on vacation next week. Now I’ll spend much of it dealing with insurance and contractors.
I guess I’ll not whine too much about our broken cherry tree since it didn’t hit anything.
Every time I go out of town on business something weird happens at home that I need to deal with when I get back. This time it was the cherry tree in the front yard. Probably from the same system of storms that knocked down your pine tree.
That’s a shame. A friend of mine had a tree smash through her roof years ago. I gave her a gift card to a garden center. She replaced the tree with an azalea bush, so it couldn’t hurt her house if it got uprooted.
The tree wasn’t uprooted – it just broke in the middle. Right now, I’m cleaning up glass in my basement (luckily, I had previously bought some cheap leather gloves)
That happened to a maple tree in my back yard, about a year ago. The trunk was roughly a foot in diameter, and it broke in half about 7 feet off the ground. Fortunately it didn’t hit the house or anything.
My mother had a huge pine tree fall while she was away from home visiting me for Christmas a few years ago. She had some damage to a door and a couple holes in the roof. The kid who was feeding her pets called her to let her know about it.
She spoke with her insurance agent by phone and he was able to get the claim sorted. They took care of all the external repair issues before she ever got back home.
Clean up the glass and go on vacation. You need it.
We have been very fortunate. In the 15 years I have lived in my current house we have had 4 and a half* pine trees of that size come down. None have done any unwanted damage** except to my fence, which I have had to repair twice. The most recent is still lying in the back yard, I have yet to saw it up.
*The half tree was already dead and the top had broken out before we moved in. The rest eventually fell as well.
**One completely took out the deck off our master bedroom - the deck that was too rotten to walk on and had to come down anyway! Work-wise it was probably a wash. Cutting up a tree that size is no fun.
The tree service was here for 2 1/2 hours cleaning up, so we can get out of the house now. The Saturn is driveable, but they may decide to total it because repairs might be too high. The assessor is supposed to be here tomorrow.
5 or was it 6 years ago the Buffalo area got hit with a freak heavy wet snowstorm on Friday the 13th in October. None of the trees lost their leaves yet and there was massive damage all over.
I went to sleep unaware of what was coming, the neighbor kid woke me up by pounding on my bedroom window around midnight. He said I might want to move my truck. It was parked at the top of my driveway under a huge 50 year old maple. I’m greatful he did, by morning a few branches some as big around as my leg and 30 feet long were where I was parked.
