The Wind Took Down Another Tree at My Maine House Almost Exactly a Year Later

Seriously. What are the odds?

On the evening of December 5, 2020 around 10 p.m., a tree fell on our house and one of our cars in the driveway. Luckily it did very minor damage to both. Just a few scratches were there was to show for it. However, it was a colossal pain in the you-know-what.

Aside from having to pay a couple of grand to have the tree removed, we thought we got lucky.

Around 12:45 a.m. on December 7, 2021, I was woken up by the sound of the wind, which was unlike anything I had ever heard. It was followed by a loud electrical buzzing and the ceiling fan spinning in our bedroom started to slow to a halt. The power was out and it was close by. I looked out the window but it was pitch black and I couldn't see any damage, so I submitted a power outage report to CMP and went back to bed.

I woke up a couple of hours later to get ready for work, and when I left I saw exactly what had happened in the rear-view camera of my car as I was backing out of the driveway.

I was starting to think we were cursed because this tree fell almost exactly a year to the date since the first one fell. But, luck was with us again and this one fell right between our property and our neighbors' with a good bit of it landing in the road. I called Michele on my way to work to tell her I found where the tree was and waited until daylight to get a better look. Michele sent me these pictures when the sun come up.

It's a good thing the wind was blowing from the southwest because this was a pretty big tree that could have done a lot more damage if it fell in a different direction.

The tree had two trunks and the smaller of the two broke off with the tip of the tree landing just about a foot into the road.

If you look closely at the above picture, that's a downed wire laying over the driveway and I drove over it not being able to see it in the dark. I'm guessing however that it's a cable for the internet, as later in the morning, a workman was tugging on it to get it out from under the trees. When I got home it was neatly coiled and fastened to the pole by CMP to leave for the cable company to put back up. When will that happen? In two days. You never realize just how much you rely on the internet until you're told "we can be there on Thursday" when it's Tuesday.

All in all, we were lucky again. But I think it's time to call a good tree service company that charges a reasonable price to come to look and see what other trouble trees we might have and take them down so we don't have to go through this again in another 366 days.