We had quite a bit of wind here lately. Wednesday night after church, I was taking Jesse home, when Philip called me. It seems that a tree had fallen over at Mom and Dad's house. I rushed home to pick up Philip so we could ride together.
What a mess we found. We turned down their road, and was meet with a firetruck. There were also quite a few cars/truck lined up on the road from the volunteers also. Mom & Dad's house was blocked, so we parked in their neighbor's drive way (behind Will's car.) We had to climb through the tree limbs to get to the front door.
The tree missed the house completely, but the branches did some damage to Daddy's van and broke the tail light out of Mom's car. But both vehicles were trapped in by the tree. Daddy was worried about his van. It's paid for, had 250,000 miles and still runs. He takes it back and forth to work and it still goes on some short trips (within a few hundred miles.) At night, it looked like the van was a gonner.
The tree (when it was standing) was not on their property, but landed from one end of their front yard almost to the other. On the way down, it brought down the electrical wires (thus the firetruck.) It pulled the meter off the house, and they were without electricity.
Since the weather was nice, Mom and Dad decided to stay at home that night. We weren't real happy about it, but didn't argue too much. We all left since there wasn't anything we could do (Jay and Miah had stopped by also.) We all left them waiting on the electric company.
The firetrucks were out there until the electric company showed up. Once they showed up (around 11:00 that evening) they shut down the electricity to the wires and re-did the wiring. At least on the outside of the house. Since the meter was taken down by the tree, they would have to get a hold of an electrician to repair that.
I took the next day off from work, so I could go down there with them. They couldn't go anywhere, and if they needed to, I wanted to be there to help them. When I got there, I had my camera. It looked completely different during the day. I could actually see the tree and the van.
This picture was taken beside where the tree stood.
These two were taken from the front porch. One looking left and the other looking right.
Daddy's boss sent over a crew from the country club to take care of the tree. They cut it into managable pieces for us to handle. The electrician came by and was able to repair the meter, but then they had to call the inspector (who stayed in town long enough to check this out before heading on vacation!) Finally at 8pm that evening, they had electricity again.
The next day a couple of guys came by an offered to clean up the rest of the yard (for a reasonable fee) so Daddy said yes. It saved us from having to do any of the work.
We were all thankful that the tree missed the house. The insurance company did total Dad's van, but everything was fine.
