CLEVELAND — Thursday afternoon's storm rolled through Greater Cleveland rather quickly, hardly leaving a path of damage, but one home took a beating.
On West 173rd Street, a home with luckily no one inside at the time was the target of an uprooted honey locust.
Doorbell footage shows the tree lifting from its front yard roots and toppling over onto the home.
The base of the tree is more than five feet tall.
Not only did the home take a hit, but also a neighbor's vehicle.
When we arrived at the home, neighbors had already covered a broken front window with a slab of wood. The car's windows were also covered with plastic.
While there, Blaha's Tree Service Owner, Adam Blaha, appeared. He said the homeowners called him to start the inspection and removal process.
"The family called me and asked me to see what I could do, and we're going to come back tomorrow (Friday) morning and remove the tree from the house," Blaha told me.
Blaha said not much could have been done to prevent the tree from uprooting.
"The roots didn't have a lot of places to go over the years," he said. "The roots go pretty deep, but if you could see where the fresh cracked roots are, that's all that was holding the tree up. All the other roots are pretty rotted, probably from the street being here for so many years. The roots didn't have a good place to really go down deep and grab a good hold. There's a lot of shale in there, so there wasn't good soil to grab for the tree to hold on to."
Blaha's Tree Service team will come back on Friday with a team of six to eight people. Blaha said the job will likely take them no more than seven hours.
"I've done this a long time and this is one of the worst I've seen in a while," Blaha said. "The tree was a good distance from the house, and it had a lot of room to build up momentum before it hit the house. If the tree was right next to the house, it wouldn't have done as much damage."
While Blaha said there was nothing the homeowners could have foreseen with this particular tree, there are ways for people to inspect on their own before storms.
"You need to properly trim them, thin them out so the air passes through them, and if you have leads that are weaker that we can identify, we could put cables in them and prevent this from happening," Blaha said.
When inspecting trees in your yard, Blaha said to make sure there are no rotting holes in the bottom and that the "crotches" in the tree are a U shape rather than a Y shape.
From what neighbors told us and what we could see, no one appeared hurt.
