This has been a crazy weekend. And I wish it were crazy because its been filled with parties and errands and on goings... but no, its been crazy because of a dead tree.
Friday we went to a Fourth of July party at Jeff's friend Marshall's place. It was a nice get together, typical get together. Good food, good people, lots of dogs running around and burning off energy. There were even planned fireworks, but storm clouds rolled in and nixed that idea. The storm wasn't too terrible. The lightning displays were great, but the wind wasn't horrible or out of the normal. Marshall lost power, so candles were lit and the party continued.
Around ten we were getting tired and decided to call it a night. We headed home wondering whether we'd have power or not, since we live about ten minutes away. As we grew closer to our street we noticed that the roads seemed increasingly worse. Traffic lights were out, lots of fresh leaves and small branches littered the road. We approached the first turn to get onto our street and found the way blocked by two cars and a tree that had fallen across the road. We did a quick U-turn and went down to the next street. On our way we saw police lights and yellow tape blocking off a nearby road. Once we got onto our road we drove slowly to avoid the debris which was noticibly larger. There was a downed power line draped across the street, but we managed to pass under it by driving on the far side of the road. Fairly harrowing.
The power was entirely out on our street but there was still enough light to see that large branches had fallen on many of our neighbors lawns. We pulled into our driveway and as I looked toward our front door, I noticed a LARGE pile of branches blocking the front walk. I figured the large pine in our front yard had lost some of its limbs to the storm. But as i followed the debris up and over i saw that it wasn't our tree's branches... the long neglected dead tree, which had formerly resided in our neighbors backyard, had broken and fallen across our house. There was a tree... on my house. A tree was on my house. On and thru.
It had split in the storm, clipped our side gate and crashed through the roof on the side wing of the house, taking out part of our porch as well. I was stunned. Jeff, who had had a good time at the party, sobered up immediately and got out to access the damage. He called 911 to report it. I sat in the car, unable to convince myself this was real.
Neighbors came out to check on us, express concern, compare notes, and offer whatever assistance we might be. The fire department showed up and agreed that, yes, we did have a tree on our house. Useless. Really we didn't know what to do so calling 911 seemed logical. They did nothing but walk around and shine a flashlight on the fallen tree. Apparently they cant give you permission to enter your own house.
Eventually we went inside to survey the damage. We found our bedroom with water dripping from the ceiling fan. The back room was pretty much destroyed, branches had shot thru the ceiling and the fall had broken the front two skylights. Andy's stuff was soaked and dirty. Not knowing when the electricity would come back on or if there were any other unseen dangers we grabbed the necessities and headed to a hotel for the night. Fortunately we found one nearby that allowed dogs. Jeff grabbed info to contact our insurance and get that ball rolling.
It was quite the 4th of July.
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