PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) — Thomas Budd was working in his Briarwood Lane home office Tuesday when he heard what he thought was a car crashing into his house.
When he got outside, he found out it was a tree crashing into his roof.
A tree fell onto the roof of Thomas Budd’s home in Portsmouth Tuesday. (WAVY viewer photo – Thomas Budd)
“Well, I was at my desk in my office in there,” he said, pointing to his home, “and I’m sitting down looking at my computer, and all of a sudden, I hear this boom, and the house actually shook. I couldn’t believe it. I was like, what the heck was that? I thought maybe a car might’ve crashed into my house or something, so I came down through the garage right here and out the back door, and I saw the leaves all over the place, and like, what the heck?
“And I looked over there and the tree limb had fallen. And I actually had a car over here and I moved it to that side of the house so I would be out of the way here in case somebody needed to get back here. It scared the crap out of me. I’m like, ‘What the heck was that?’ At first I thought it was lightning, then I thought it was a car, and then this.”
In Budd’s yard, you could see the damaged tree that had snapped off and fell onto his roof.
A crew from Simpson’s Tree Service came out and worked to get the tree off the roof and clean up the debris. After the tree had been removed, a man could be seen on the roof blowing debris off the roof. Because so much of the canopy came down — more than 25% — the rest of the tree will also have to come down.
“The first thing we want to do is keep everybody away the best we can, keep everybody away from what’s actually going on,” said Matt Johnson with Simpson’s Tree Service. “We want to make sure that we can take the tree off evenly so it doesn’t further any more damage. We want to get the holes covered up in case there’s any more rain. So we want to get that covered up so that rain, water, anything like that, doesn’t fill back in and start messing up his drywall or [does] any damage inside the house.”
Johnson explained what happened with the tree, pointing to a white area where the tree had broken off. He said the knot of the tree is where water can get inside the tree, rotting it on the inside and weakening it.
WAVY viewers have sent in photos of downed trees and areas of flooding. Amy Kahn said a small tree fell in front of her truck on Route 32 South near Cypress Chapel Road in Suffolk around 11:20 a.m.
Another tree was found to be down Tuesday afternoon in Hampton.
WAVY viewer John Butler took a photo of this tree that had fallen in Hampton Tuesday. (WAVY viewer photo – John Butler)
WAVY viewers Donna and Nelson Rose shared video of the storm on the Little River in Hertford, North Carolina.
Another viewer shared a video of flooding in his backyard in Virginia Beach.
A big band of rain moved into the region overnight Monday into Tuesday, bringing with it light-to-moderate showers and some heavier downpours. Winds from the southeast have been gusting up to 25 mph, pulling up a lot of deep and rich moisture. The storm, which was still moving through the region Tuesday afternoon, could still bring with it strong thunderstorms and isolated tornadoes.
Dominion Energy prepared for the possible impacts of the weather, from flooding to outages.
