Everyone in the house had already evacuated before the neighbor’s tall fir tree fell in Jesse Lambert’s driveway Thursday morning, clipping his house on the way down.
They had their eye on it since Wednesday, Lambert said, when gusts in Vancouver flirted with 40 mph.
“You could see the wind gusts were really strong,” he said.
Everyone inside left that day, to stay in a travel trailer parked at his sister’s house.
Lambert said he’d been living in the house for three to four years and didn’t pay quite as much mind to the trees around their house, near Southeast 164th Avenue and Southeast Evergreen Highway, until the wind started picking up.
Gusts Thursday at Pearson Field reached 38 mph, according to the National Weather Service in Portland. That tree started looking pretty dubious a while earlier, Lambert said.
“I think you start looking up more because of the wind,” he said. “We were watching the trees, and that’s when we noticed it.”
Lambert was at work Thursday morning when a neighbor told him the tree had finally uprooted and fell, punching several holes in the top of Lambert’s laundry room on the way down.
The tree, which was about 2 feet wide at the base, knocked the top from a fir tree on Lambert’s lot, snapped multiple branches from another tree in the front of the lot and crushed a good chunk of the front yard’s decorative fence.
The tree fell right around where his travel trailer is usually parked, Lambert said.
Thankfully, he said, he has a friend with a local tree service company, and Clark Public Utilities responded quickly.
Fallen or leaning trees temporarily knocked out power for more than 4,000 customers around the county Thursday, according to Clark Public Utilities, with the largest single outage hitting about 1,800 that morning in the Cascade Park area.
Many of the outages were scattered around more wooded areas in the northern and eastern parts of the county, utility spokeswoman Erica Erland said.
The wind was expected to ebb Friday, blowing at speeds around 14 mph with gusts up to about 22 mph. Forecasters also backed off some on the severity of an expected winter storm.
Clark County Public Works spokesman Jeff Mize said he heard of no especially significant wind damage, but said he wouldn’t be surprised if the eastern reaches of the county see some ice Friday morning.
The National Weather Service, after calling for a couple of inches of snow and possible freezing rain for Thursday, said any new ice accumulation Friday would amount to less than a tenth of an inch.
Rain is likely Friday for Vancouver, forecasters said, and the high temperature will be near 34 degrees.
Friday’s low should be about the same, the weather service said. Rain is still likely, but no freezing rain is forecast.
Whatever freezing rain and ice Friday brings will likely accumulate most toward the mouth of the Columbia River Gorge.
The weekend forecast for Vancouver calls for rain.
