SPANAWAY, Wash. — The worst of the flooding may be behind us, but the hazards are not.
In Spanaway, high winds and the saturated ground brought a massive tree down on a home, nearly crushing a teen.
The tree, which had three trunks, split the house nearly completely in half. Everyone inside made it out safely.
“The middle one just went straight through the house, all the way to the other side,” Ashley Rowley said of the damage.
Rowley was at work early Wednesday morning when she got a call that her house had been crushed by a falling tree. She rushed home, intent on finding her two teenage children who were inside when it happened,
“I was just screaming for them because I couldn’t get ahold of them, couldn’t find them,” she said.
The teens were safe. They had made it over to a neighbor’s house.
One of them was standing by the front door when the tree came down and narrowly avoided getting crushed.
“He walks out of his room and he said that it just came through,” Rowley said. “He just didn’t know what to do, so he went and got his sister.”
Rowley told KIRO 7 her children rescued all seven of their dogs before leaving the home.
“They did carry each dog out, one by one,” she said. “They are a lot braver than me.”
Rowley said the fields around her house flooded this week, but the water didn’t make it into the home. She thought they were all clear, but the saturated ground and high winds were yet to come.
Beth Stock of She Cuts It Tree Service, who is handling the incident, told KIRO 7 the house is a total loss.
“I think it’s toast,” Rowley said. “It’s bad. Merry Christmas.”
Stock told KIRO 7 double- and triple-trunk trees are at an especially high risk of falling after flooding because a single root system supports all the mass above ground. She urges homeowners to pay attention to the bases of their trees. Circular bulging of the ground near a tree indicates it may soon fall.
Rowley and her children are okay, but one of their three cats is still missing in the wreckage.
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