Neighbors Relieved After Giant Tree Limb Does Damage but Causes No Injuries

Tony Krol said he knew this day would come. He just had no idea it would come at 1:10 a.m. this morning.

“Sound asleep…the dog must have woken up 10 seconds before; she must have heard the breaking of the branch,” said Krol, who has lived at 424 Peyton Ave. with his wife Gail for the past 14 years. “She kind of alerted us, she started to bark, it was a loud boom and explosion and crack. Kind of scary.”

Krol and his wife jumped out of bed, grabbed flashlights and ran out the front door. 

“I didn’t see any sparking,” he said. “I was a little relive there was no sparking anywhere. Thank God it fell toward the street because if it fell toward the house we would have been in trouble.”

There was no damage to his neat, two-story colonial after one of three 60-foot limbs of the sprawling tree crashed to the ground. It plunged into power and utility lines, ripping them from the walls of several houses, and snapping a utility pole holding the wires in half at the corner of Peyton and Elm avenues.

The commotion woke the entire block. Krol said an impromptu block party broke out with neighbors gathered in the street amid the streaming, red lights of fire and police cars.

“Living in a forest like this you never know when a big limb might be coming down on somebody’s house,” said Don Cain, who lives across the street from Krol. “My car was parked right out here and it just missed my car… I knew I should have pulled it in.”

Cain was one of many who attended the middle-of-the-night “party.”

“Look at the height at some of these tree,” he said Tuesday morning. “When they come down, bad things happen.”

Power was restored to most of the neighborhood before 10 a.m., PSE&G utility foreman Barry Newman said after climbing down from a truck with a power lift and bucket.

Cameron Lyon, who operates a tree service company and was at the scene, said Krol’s red oak tree was relatively health but waterlogged from recent rain and had grown in such a way that it couldn’t support its own weight.

Patch contributor Shelly Castorino contributed to this report.

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