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Woman narrowly escapes injury when tree falls on home
CLOVERDALE — A woman narrowly escaped serious injury or worse when a tree fell on her home during the storms that rolled through the area Friday evening.
Brenda Lawson was at home in her house trailer on Pumpkin Ridge Road in northern Owen County east of Cunot when the worst of the storm struck.
A tree in her front yard fell in the high winds directly onto the house.
“The tree fell and missed her by about one foot to the left of her chair and just came through the center of her trailer,” nephew Chris Edwards told the Banner Graphic.
Edwards, a severe weather specialist for the Putnam County Emergency Management Agency, said Lawson called him at 6:06 p.m., still in her chair and buried under ceiling debris.
“She was in a panic, her hands were shaking and she couldn’t dial 911,” Edwards said.
He further said that he could hear yelling outside of others trying to get in to check on Lawson. However, in addition to the extensive debris, the door could not be opened, as the frame of the mobile home was bent.
Edwards soon joined those trying to get into the house, digging through the wreckage until he discovered Lawson up in a crevice between piles of debris.
“We’ve been digging out most of the stuff leisurely throughout the weekend,” Edwards said.
While any such damage is difficult to deal with, the storm came at an especially inopportune time for Edwards, who had just had new carpet installed a few days before and was set to have the offending tree taken down this week.
Still, Lawson escaped with her health, having suffered only minor head injuries and bruising. She is currently staying next door with Chris’s mother.
The severe weather came from the remnants of Hurricane Helene, which made landfall earlier in the week and did some of its most serious damage in the Appalachian mountains, dropping 30-35 inches in parts of the south and killing more than 100 people.
The storm began to stall out over Kentucky, but still managed to bring plenty of rain and high winds to Indiana.
Edwards noted that wind gusts as high as 68 mph were recorded at Indianapolis, while the fastest recorded at Putnam County Regional Airport was 48-49 mph.
He further said, however, that based on tree damage he has seen, the highest winds in Putnam County were probably in the 55-60 mph range.
“Indiana gets occasional hurricane remnants up here,” Edwards said. “We already had Beryl in July, and it brought some tornadoes. But they do provide good rainfall when we need it.”
Locally, Putnam County 911 Dispatch reported 47 road debris calls and 24 reports of lines down, in addition to 44 other calls related to the weather, including two personal injury accidents.
At peak, around 9 p.m. Friday, local electrical utilities tracked 2,669 locations without power. By 9 a.m. Saturday, outrages were down to 689, most of which were not cleared up until Sunday.
As of Monday morning, four local outages remained, a number that had dropped to one by early afternoon.
Other than the two personal injury crashes, no injuries were reported locally as a result of the storm.