Hit and Run on P Street
“I woke up feeling a huge thud on the house,” Amy Stroh said. “It was surreal, I could hear a truck and scratching on the windows. As the scraping sounds continued, I kept trying to make some kind of sense of it,” she continued. “Maybe they are doing early tree work of some kind? That truck is meant to be there?”
Ms. Stroh’s thoughts as the sounds continued were to get away from the windows, wake up her daughter, and figure out what was happening.
“I wasn’t sure the bricks weren’t going to start coming down.”
It was 6:10 am, Ms. Stroh’s house was besieged by leaves and branches and the sound had finally stopped. She looked through the branches and could see a blue truck exiting the scene.
As it turns out, a huge tree had been hit by a trash truck, apparently shifted into lower gears, and kept going, as reported by a road crew member who was doing early paperwork at the other end of the block. The large tree hit her house and split, and Ms. Stroh was told by the firefighter who responded to the 911 call that, “the house was stronger than the tree.”
“I couldn’t get out to take my daughter to school,” Ms. Stroh said, “as my front door was covered with branches and the alley was blocked by the trunk of the tree. We were stranded.” “The firemen cut the branches from the door so we could get out and my daughter was picked up by her grandmother, and she made it to school on time.”
The tree was gone by noon.
“The foreman of the paving company got on with 911 and told them it needed to be attended to immediately, that the tree was putting the neighborhood at risk,” Ms. Stroh said. “He was great.”
“It was an awakening experience,” Ms. Stroh said as we finished our conversation.
Indeed.
