BERKS COUNTY, Pa. – A round of storms around 4:30 Wednesday afternoon caught many people by surprise.
That included drivers near Spring Street Subway in Reading. Emergency reports also showed wires down near Hamburg and trees down onto power lines along Mount Penn Road.
But in Cumru Township, the damage looked very different. A large tree crashed into a home on Quail Ridge Drive.
Homeowner Kristen Overly said she was driving home from work when she got a call from her 16-year-old son Jackson.
“My son Jackson — he’s 16 — he called me in a panic, saying that he was in the garage trying to get something and he heard a loud bang,” Overly said.
She said Jackson walked into the house and found debris everywhere. The home is now uninhabitable.
“I’ve lived in the woods all my life, and this has never happened, so this is scary stuff, but thankfully everybody was OK,” Overly said. “I’m just glad that my son is OK. I feel like his guardian angels were watching over him.”
Outside, cleanup plans were already underway. One of the people helping was her nephew, Brody Trostle, who owns a tree company.
“My grandfather called my dad and told him, and I was thinking I trimmed a tree here the other year and I saw that it had died, so I thought it might have been that one,” Trostle said. “But no, it was probably the biggest one on the property. Go figure. Came right down on the center of the roof.”
He said a tree this size requires major equipment.
“The plan is to get the crane out here either tomorrow morning or Friday morning,” Trostle said. “We’re going to take it off, piece by piece, and then we’re going have to support the trunk wood before that comes off and that trunk’s probably gonna be upwards of 20,000 pounds.”
Cleanup efforts were already underway Wednesday night as crews continue working through storm damage reported across Berks County.