Sixty foot pine crashes into Coeymans home.

Posted at: 09/08/2012 11:32 PM
By: Dan Levy

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COEYMANS - "It could have been a lot worse!"

That's what a Coeymans woman was saying Saturday night  after a sixty foot pine tree came crashing through her roof during a violent late afternoon rain and wind storm.

"All of a sudden I heard the snap, crackle, and pop of the tree," said Annette Tuosto, standing outside her condemned home at Fleming's Trailer Park. "I didn't realize that's what it was at the time."

But it didn't take long to figure it out.

"I looked out the window and I'm watching all the wind blow the trees around and then everything in the house just rocked, just like a freight train hit it," Tuosto continued.

Directly next door, Annette Plows realized, there but for the grace of God, the tree could very easily have fallen in the opposite direction, onto her house.

"We heard the tree crack and we all covered our heads and ducked down in the kitchen," Plows says.

"We looked out the window and watched it go over," said Jamie Mannara, another neighbor. "We watched it spark, the wires started sparking."

Ten year old Destiny Rossman said she heard about the tornado warning on the news, looked out the window, saw what was happening, and became very scared because she knew her friend was inside the house of fate.

"The tree was right there and it turned and it went boom and I started crying and burst out in tears," Destiny said.

But her friend and everyone else escaped from the house unharmed.

Meanwhile, neighbors insist that what happened Saturday was inevitable since a lightning strike on the same same tree about six weeks ago severely weakened it. They feel the tree should have been taken down at that time which would have prevented the near tragedy on Saturday.

the Red Cross is helping Annette Tuosto find a new place to live.