The Great Poplar Tree Disaster!

I was driving us home from the park yesterday evening, and it was coming one heck of a storm.  We were almost home, and I had stopped at a stop sign, when we saw what we assumed was some doofus backing his Jeep up in the middle of the highway in front of us because he had missed his turn.  After the 'doofus' got out of our way, I was able to turn at the stop sign.  It was then that we were able to see that the guy wasn't a doofus after all; he had to back up and go the other way, because a tree was laying across the road, completely blocking it, and the tree had taken down the phone line with it!

Well, since the tree had come down (conveniently) directly across from my brother & sister-in-law's house, I felt like I had authorization to play Daisy Duke and drive through their front yard to get around the downed tree.  

Everybody else had to turn around and go back the way they came, heh heh.

Jamie called 911 and reported the mess, and a cop came on the scene within a matter of moments.  It helped that Jamie fibbed and told them that there was a box of doughnuts trapped underneath the downed tree.  Ha ha, just kidding!  ;)

I drove the car down lower in my brother's yard, and we sat there and watched the events unfold for a few minutes.  I took the opportunity to snap a couple of pictures.

(You can see how the tree brought down the phone line):

Then the cop arrived on the scene.  (The white car is in the process of doing a 57-point turn in the middle of the road, in order to go back the other way from whence it came):

When we finally drove out of my brother's yard and went across the street to our house, we could see that the downed tree (which had been growing at the edge of a small stream) had actually completely uprooted.  So I suppose the sudden storm with torrential rains must have saturated the ground with water too quickly, causing the tree to just turn loose and fall down.

Not long after we got home, we began to hear chainsaws running, and knew that they would have the tree cleared up and out of the road really soon.  The phone (and more importantly, internet service), however, was a different story.  I wasn't very happy about having to spend an entire evening without the internet to surf, thanks to this stupid tree knocking down the line.  So it wasn't until sometime this morning that we got both the phone and internet service back.

This morning, we walked over to check out the fallen tree first-hand.  Here's a handy-dandy slideshow of the disaster aftermath (enlarge to Full Screen for best results):