Ouch!
As I have stated before, I am a forester. Part of my job entails performing hazard tree evaluations to make sure trees don’t fall on people and kill them. Every week I get at least one Google Alert about a tree falling on some poor soul. This week, I have received alerts about 3 separate instances in which people have been either killed or seriously injured by a tree as they were camping, or simply driving by at the wrong time.
I have personally been involved with some of these types of cases involving serious injury and, more often, death. It takes some seriously bad luck to be the person near one of these huge trees when they decide they have had it with fighting gravity.
August 19, 2007 at 10:36 am
You know, that is something I never thought about, but surely it must happen. Poles, tress, traffic lights, bridges – they all are equally likely to fall down I suppose.
It is amazing how many pending hazzards there are and yet the majority of us seem to avoid them daily! Since I live in the city, the odds of a tree falling on me are by far less than average
August 22, 2007 at 9:24 am
Hey, in 2003, both our cars were totalled by the same very, very large pine that came down from our neighbor’s yard during Hurricane Isabel. We were all okay though.
Two lessons learned:
Don’t park your cars together before a hurricane; and,
If the accident is in your yard, your insurance pays for it (no matter where the tree/random item came from).
August 22, 2007 at 9:27 am
Wrecked cars are the smallest problem when it comes to this kind of thing. Once there is an injury or death, it becomes a mess of biblical proportions. I have been dealing with these on and off for the last 10 years, and it never gets any easier or better.