Old Oak Nearly Takes Out Two Roster Researchers

By Keith Edmondson

Editor's note: Two longtime CCA members had a very close encounter with a downed tree, but this tree wasn't in the river. And it was all because of the annual CCA Rosters. Keith explains how it happened. Photos are by Keith—for more, see his CCA Photo Album.

On June 19, 2025, at approximately 2:30 pm, Alf Cooley and I were looking at some of the CCA Rosters that I had borrowed for research from the CCA Archives. We were in my home office, which was one of the three bedrooms in my home. Outside it was stormy. We heard a sound like a quick knock on the roof in the direction of the living room, like a small branch hitting the roof. So, we went to see if there might have been some damage. Not two minutes later, we heard a very loud sound in the direction of the bedrooms, and then we saw a huge plume of dust billowing out of the hallway, not unlike an approaching sandstorm. We knew something major had happened.

Upon investigating, we discovered that in all three bedrooms, the ceilings were caved in with fiberglass insulation and chunks of ceiling plaster all over everything. (The house is 75 years old and had real plaster, not drywall.) Ceiling joists were splintered and jutting down at odd angles, with sharp ends poking down all over the place. Fiberglass batting that was still attached where it had been under the attic floor was also hanging down. I noted that my bed, in particular, was covered in about 6 inches of both fiberglass insulation batting and blown insulation. Copious amounts of wet dust and fiberglass powdered every surface and covered my bed sheets and blankets. There was a large piece of plaster on my pillow, and I shudder to think what I would have gone through if this had happened in the middle of night when I was sleeping. The ceiling fan in the bedroom was hanging at a careening angle with broken blades.

Upon further investigation in the other rooms, we saw the artificial leather on the office chairs had been punctured by sharp plaster. The ceiling light in the spare bedroom was very dark in color from the dirty water that was filling the frosted lens cover. Everywhere we looked, the rain continued to fall inside the bedrooms, which now had open "skylights" from the tree branches poking through the ceilings. Some of the CCA Rosters we had been looking through were scattered on the floor, though the bulk of them were safely out in the living room on tables I had set up for us to study them.

The first thing we did was to try to assess the damage from inside, then we walked out the back door and around outside to see what damage had occurred. When we went to the front door, we realized we no longer had access to the yard beyond the porch, which normally led to the 35 steps down to the street. (I later had to cut the branches away with my chainsaw). We had to exit through the back shop porch door and down the side of the house where there were live electrical wires lying on the ground, to which we gave a wide berth.

While both of us were alive and uninjured, things could have been very different. If we had not heard that first sound that caused us to leave the office, which was likely a small branch hitting the roof, we would have been injured or possibly killed. It was a mere two minutes between hearing the first sound and the tree falling, crushing the three bedrooms.

At the base of the tree, the tree left an eight-foot-deep hole in the ground where the root ball came up, because the ground was so rain-soaked. The large oak tree had been growing up by the back yard neighbor's fence, on my side of the property line and up on a hill. The trunk, at least 2½ feet in diameter, was laying parallel to the ground and across the top brick and cement block back wall of the house, and extending through the attic roof and well beyond the front of the house. Indeed, the very top of the tree was within 6 feet of my car at the curb. Since there was no longer any roof or attic on a third of the house, the only access to the attic, and my stored belongings, was now up ladders, because the tree trunk was blocking the hallway ceiling hatch and ladder.

When Alf was ready to leave, I gave the CCA Rosters to him to take back to our club archivist, Barb Brown. Those that had been in the office were a bit harder to find; one of them, the 1961 Roster, took over a month to recover. It had taken some damage from the almost daily rains and the mold that took over the bedrooms, but was salvageable.

That first day, my focus was to move my electronics and my family's heirlooms to the undamaged areas of the house—living room, dining room, kitchen, and shop porch. Working alone, that was all I could safely remove from the damaged rooms. Even my cello took some cosmetic surface damage from falling plaster, where it had been on the pin stand in the office.

There were other trees down too. One large section was in my next-door neighbor's backyard, but it had come from the backdoor neighbor's tree, which had snapped off about 60 feet up in the air and was at least a foot in diameter. The neighbor's 7-foot fence was almost completely down from the number of trees that had fallen on it. I later learned that trees were down all over the DC area due to that storm.

So, if I were a cat, one could say I now have seven lives left, after losing the first when I almost died from immersion hypothermia back in 1977 when I was still a beginning paddler (see "Dangerous Waters on the Potomac," Cruiser, January-February 2024). Now I've lost another of those nine lives, and again, through sheer luck, I am still alive. I guess the universe still has plans for me.