Seventy-six-year-old Eloise White has lived in her Dug Hill Road residence in Sabraton since 1983, but her world came crashing down, quite literally, after a tree fell from across the road two weeks ago during high winds in the area.
On the evening of Jan. 12, White was sitting in her living room, which is next to the kitchen.
“I heard this loud crash,” she said. “It was like a thunder crash.”
She quickly discovered a large oak tree had fallen onto her kitchen from across the road.
“Everything was in the kitchen charging because I knew we had wind and possibly would need my flashlights and stuff,” she said. “My phone I had left in the kitchen, so all that stuff was gone. So, I had no numbers because all your numbers are in your phone.”
Fortunately, a friend of her son lives close by and was able to help her contact him.
“It was pouring rain and really couldn’t see the extent of the damage,” White said. “The next day we came over to the house and I just cried and cried. It just destroyed it, I mean down to the kitchen floor.”
The tree also destroyed her deck and totaled her car.
“I just felt like my mind was so cluttered — I just didn’t absorb a lot of stuff at first. I lost so much of everything in my house.”
To make matters worse, White was not able to get much assistance until the following Tuesday due to the long Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend.
Clean-up on the home, which was condemned following the incident, has been started but White and her neighbors are concerned that this could easily happen again.
“This is the fourth tree that we’ve had fall from across the road,” White said, adding that three have fallen in the last eight months or so from the wooded area on the other side of Dug Hill Road.
White said there are still a couple trees across from her that she is concerned might fall but she is also worried about others on the road because “it’s all the way up and down the road.”
“I don’t want to rebuild my house there — it’s bad enough you have to worry about the flooding from the creek — but I don’t want to have to worry about another tree,” she said.
“I want to protect the people on this road. These trees — even if they don’t take them all the way down — just so they don’t cross the road and hit houses. I know our road is not the only one that has trees, but they need to do something,” she said of the city of Morgantown.
The Dominion Post reached out to Morgantown officials regarding the tree at White’s residence and the concerns about trees along the road.
According to Morgantown Urban Landscapes Director Marchetta Maupin, the incident at White’s Sabraton residence is still being investigated.
“The city assumes the same responsibility for monitoring trees as other landowners,” Maupin stated.
“Residents are encouraged to report trees of concern via Morgantown 311, the city’s mobile app/request system powered by SeeClickFix. Once a potentially hazardous tree has been identified, it is inspected by an ISA-certified arborist. If a tree is determined to be a hazard, the city will make a plan to address the issue,” Maupin said.
For now, White is trying to salvage what she can from the home and is grateful she was not injured or worse, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
“I’m devastated and I’m homeless. Thank God my nephew is letting me stay at his house until they rebuild the house,” she said. “I could have handled this when I was a young woman, but I’m 76 and you just feel like your whole life has just vanished.”
TWEET @DominionPostWV
