A tall tree crashed into a brick home in Birmingham, Ala., during a severe storm Thursday evening, killing two girls and injuring three others, authorities said.
The girls, a 3-month-old and a 3-year-old, were pronounced dead at the scene, said Battalion Chief Sebastian Carrillo of Birmingham Fire and Rescue. An 11-year-old boy and two women suffered “significant” injuries, he added, while five other people who were in the house escaped unhurt. The relationships between those involved were not clear.
Chief Carrillo said he did not know the type of tree that had fallen, but described it as “much taller than a telephone pole” and as thick and wide as a “small sedan.”
The two women who were injured were found close to each other on the ground floor, trapped under the tree, Chief Carrillo said. One of them, he continued, was sitting in a recliner. To avoid injuring them further, authorities removed them from under the tree by cutting the ground beneath them and lowering them into a net installed in the basement, Chief Carrillo said.
The episode occurred early Thursday evening as a severe thunderstorm, which included lightning, swept through the Birmingham area, bringing heavy rain and winds of up to 70 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service, which urged people to stay off the roads. More than 50,000 people were without power Thursday night, according to an outage map.
Chief Carrillo said the storm had dumped a lot of rain on Birmingham in a short amount of time, leading to flooding.
Residents of the home where the tree fell, in the west Birmingham neighborhood of College Hills, heard a “big boom” that they took to be lightning striking the tree, Chief Carrillo said. That’s when five of the 10 people inside the house managed to escape.
Authorities were alerted to a 911 call at 5:35 p.m., in which a woman screamed that she couldn’t breathe and that she and others were trapped.
Birmingham officials know how to deal with trees falling on homes during storms, Chief Carrillo said, but added that in a 28-year career as a firefighter, this episode seemed exceptional because of the number of people they had to be attended to
“I don’t remember so many people being involved in one of these rescues,” he said.