Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
The windstorm that blew through Oregon on Sunday last week left Sweet Home largely untouched, other than a power outage on Sunday, some debris and a tree or two across roads – one on Long Street and another that landed on the front part of a garage and a power line on Eighth Avenue.
But one Whiskey Butte family is dealing with some 10 locust trees that fell on their home in the final throes of the storm on Monday. A neighbor had a couple of trees fall in the yard.
“Everyone says we have a tree house now,” Leona Williams said. She said she was still shaken up on Friday but she was keeping up a sense of humor.
She and her husband, Woody, were home when the trees came down.
“It was like hurricane-force winds,” Woody said. When the gusts hit, it sounded like a sonic boom.
Sunday night, Leona (pronounced lee-awna) was home by herself. The wind was intense, the power out, and she bundled herself up in her room with her dog and a candle. Woody came home from work in the morning, and she let him sleep while the wind roared around their home Monday morning.
“It got so loud, it seemed worse than the night before,” Leona said. She woke Woody up at about 11 a.m.
He got up and saw that the tree nearest the road was leaning precariously, Leona said. “He said, ‘I better move the vehicles.'”
Woody moved the vehicles around back from the front of the home.
Five minutes later, they were standing in the center of their living room watching the effects of the wind through the living room window.
“It was pushing rain through every little crack in the house,” Woody said.
“You could feel the wind through the walls,” Leona said.
They watched as the trees started collapsing like dominoes onto their home and retreated toward the rear of the house where the tops of the locust trees were then visible. Approximately a half dozen root balls, with about 10 separate trees, had been torn up from the ground.
“I learned something about locust trees,” Woody said. “Once they mature, the roots start rotting in the ground.”
“It sounded like a freight train hitting our house,” Leona said. She is convinced the wind reached more than 100 mph.
The trees cracked the chimney and twisted floors and ceilings slightly. One branch poked through the second-story wall.
The couple’s two sons stay with them sometimes, but they weren’t home that day, Leona said. The Williamses have been staying at the Sweet Home Inn and working constantly around their home.
The house is insured, Woody said. At the end of last week, they were waiting for a structural engineer to determine whether the home was still structurally sound or a total loss.
“I hope it’s going to be enough,” Woody said of the insurance. “It’s going to be at least a couple of weeks before we know what’s going to happen.”
It’s rough, Leona said. “Your whole world just gets ripped out from under you.”