Posted on 07/19/2005 1:41:41 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
ZEPHYRHILLS - The lake at Zephyr Park was like glass early Monday evening as 63-year-old Nancy Booth and her two adult children sat at a picnic table beneath a great oak tree.
No rain, no wind, mostly clear.
Then, witnesses heard a horrible crack. The oak at the water's edge was splitting.
Booth's children scampered out of the way, but one of the huge falling limbs pinned their mother to bench where she sat.
Booth's daughter, Caloie, ran to a passing van yelling for help.
The driver, 39-year-old Gary Killeen, having seen the tree fall, jumped out of the van and ran toward the table.
Nancy Booth still was alive, Killeen recalled, and her son, Glenn, was trying to lift the branch. The mother looked at Killeen.
"Please help me," he recalled her saying.
Then, she closed her eyes.
Killeen and at least a dozen other bystanders rushed to the scene and tried to lift the limb.
Minutes later, Booth's son told Killeen to stop. The limb couldn't be lifted, and Nancy Booth was dead, Killeen said.
Debbie Streets, who has walked the path around the lake nearly every night for a decade, said she often saw the Booths.
Streets didn't know Booth and her children by name, she said, but they always smiled as she passed.
It was about 6:30 p.m. Monday when she had passed the Zephyrhills family, sitting around the wooden table.
"I just started hearing the tree rip apart," Streets said. "You couldn't see anyone."
The crack was so sudden, Streets said, it seemed inexplicable.
"A hurricane came and didn't knock any trees down," she said.
Zephyrhills police Chief Russell Barnes said the great oak appeared to be in "good shape."
The tree was alive and mostly green except for a dead part in the center, but that was surrounded by good bark, he said.
The limbs that fell near the table were about a foot in diameter, Barnes said.
"For as long as that tree's been there, it could have happened at any time, it could have fallen in the middle of the night," Barnes said. "For (her life) to end like this is just ridiculous."
--Times staff writer Jamal Thalji contributed to this report.
Not to mention the canopies the trees grow, limiting the light that gets to the ground, so undergrowth that rodents would eat gets limited, so the poor spotted owls don't have any rodents to eat, so they move away. Deowlization.
Yes. These trees are taking more than their fair share.
;<)
So would you rather she have died at that same moment after a long painful struggle with cancer? or perhaps after being raped and dismembered while still alive by moslem terrorists? Death is death. It's the step we all have to take to get to our eternal reward (whatever that reard may be). If God chooses to have a tree fall on someone when it's their time to go who are you to say no?
God's plan for us changes daily as we either obey or disobey Him. That is, He sets a course for our life and constantly adjusts events around us to bring us to where He wants us to be. The only question is how much pain and suffering, or joy and triumph do we want to go through in order to get there.
I am not wise enough to know all the ramifications of this death. How will her kids react, or the people who live nearby, or all the people on FR who read about it. But God is.
This was a real event, where a bridge collapsed in eighteenth-century Peru killing five people. The bridge had been there for 100's of years so many felt that its collapse was an act of God. Wilder wrote about the people who died and tried to answer the question of why God would chose them.
We always want an answer.
Sometimes there isn't one.
I'm so sorry.
In Florida, high winds blow many big trees down, pines and hardwoods alike. The palms mostly just bend and lose fronds. A pine, three stories high and slim, crashed down on the house across the street from me after a recent storm. Luckily, it hit across the front entranceway and the roof corner with no damage.
It took over a month to cut that baby up in pieces (which were really heavy), remove the stump, haul everything away and remove literally millions of pine needles from a large area of the grounds.
We neighbors knew for years that this tree would fall eventually. Just a matter of which house it would fall on.
Unfortunately, throughout Florida, which is heavily wooded away from the coasts, many of the locals can't afford the cost of tree trimming labor.....and many have lost their lives, cars or roofs due to this very common financial circumstance. It could be my across-the-street neighbor didn't have available funds and were just trusting in luck.
Leni
Like time bombs waiting to go off.
Leni
Virtually every mature hardwood that you see is hollow or rotten in the center.
No growth at all takes place in the center of any tree, young or old. Both the xylem and phloem are contained in the outer sections, just beneath the bark. This is why girdled trees die - their food source is cut off by whatever is binding the outside of the tree.
More large trees than you care to imagine are closer to collapse than not. If they are completely upright/reasonable symmetrical, then there's probably no worries.
But if they are previously damaged, leaning (like along a riverbank - in the story), infested with insects (especially wood-destroying insects) or subjected to unusual winds or stress - well, there could be trouble.
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