South Jackson Street home dodges bullet
Published 1:23 am Friday, March 31, 2017
Dan Campbell called someone last week about removing two dangerous limbs from the 200-year-old oak tree in the front yard of his South Jackson Street home.
Ironically, those were not the limbs that barely missed his house after a severe storm swept through the area Thursday.
Campbell woke around 12:30 a.m. to what he thought was hail crashing around his house, which sits at the corner of South Jackson Street and Natchez Avenue. He said it sounded like loud machine gun fire.
He rushed out to find out what it was and through flashes of lightning saw part of the oak down in his yard and across the carriage house next to his house that he uses as a carport and workshop.
“We were very blessed it did not come through the house,” he said.
He figured he’d wait until morning to survey the actual damage. His stepdaughter, 9-year-old Ainsley Cox, had been sleeping downstairs instead of upstairs in her room, but she crawled into bed with him and her mom, Suzanne, to get some sleep.
Campbell said he tried to sleep but kept waiting to hear more crashes. Fortunately, they never came.
The limbs he’d called about made it through the storm. “There’s nowhere for them to fall but on the house,” he said.
The limbs that did fall will cause the tree to die, so he’ll have it removed completely. The largest limb, which had power lines tangled in the branches, blocked one lane of Natchez Avenue Thursday morning.