Storm Betty: Woman (94) trapped in home overnight by fallen tree

The tallest tree on Palmerston Road stood in June Judd’s front garden for more than a century but when it was knocked by Storm Betty in the early hours of Saturday morning she merely looked out her window at the root and branch upheaval and went back to bed.

Several hours later when the stoic 94-year-old was up and about she took a closer look and realised she had been trapped in her home by the falling tree as had her neighbours and tenants who live in her basement.

She also understood almost immediately that in spite of the severe damage to her front garden, how fortunate she had been in the middle of the stormiest of nights.

[ Storm Betty: ‘Like being attacked by a sea monster’ - clean up and power outages continue ]

The lime tree which had towered over her three story home in Rathmines, south Dublin since the 1880s fell through the narrowest of gaps between her house and her neighbour’s home. Had the wind taken it even a couple of metres to the left or right untold damage would have been done to either of the properties.

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Her neighbours had an even more fortunate escape and were, she says, standing on their doorstep talking to a garda about an attempted break-in at their home just minutes before the tree came crashing down.

When The Irish Times suggested that the burglar had quite the lucky escape too, Ms Judd’s daughter Jen Searle laughed and joked: “Well we don’t know, he might still be under it.”

The sound of the tree falling was loud enough to wake Ms Searle’s husband in their house more than 100 metres further up the road but she slept through the din.

“My husband’s woke up to this loud crack and that was a 2am and we think that must have been the roots snapping,” she said.

Ms Searle only realised that the landscape of her mother’s front garden had been dramatically changed when she got a call hours later.

“It could have been a lot more damage,” Ms Judd said from her suddenly brightly-lit living room and while the storm had turned her garden upside down she was relaxed about its impact.

“No,” she said directly when asked if she would miss the tree.

She was speaking to a soundtrack of chainsaws with team of tree doctors performing emergency surgery in the garden.

The clean up will take several days and will involve a crane, needed to lift the tree trunk away from the property.

“It couldn’t have fallen in a better way and if it had fallen against the house the clean up would have been much more difficult,” said Colin Nixon as he took a break from sawing bits off the tree.

“It’s a shame to lose it,” he added. “I’d say there was problems with the roots. There’s not a lot of space for the roots to expand in an urban setting like this and the anchorage is limited with all the concrete.

“When a tree is this size you really want bigger roots but no one was killed and we’ll be able to manage.”