Lori Abbott was watching TV Tuesday night when the lights cut out, a sudden outage triggered by the severe storms sweeping through the Pittsburgh area.
“I wanted to see what was going on,” said Abbott, 65, as she walked outside her Milton Street home in Regent Square. “I came out and saw that there was a tree on my car.”
But it wasn’t the only tree that had fallen in her vicinity. It was one of four that she noticed had fallen on her block — obstructing the road — and it was infested with bees.
“There’s no place to go,” Abbott said. “We’re effectively trapped.”
She’s lived in the Regent Square duplex for the last 23 years with her husband. Her sister lives in the unit above her. The bees have also called that tree home for about the same period of time.
“We came out, and it was still raining,” Abbott said, pointing toward the first-floor windows. “I didn’t hear the tree go down, and … we were sitting right where those windows are because that’s the living room.”
Abbott called her daughter, who lives nearby on East End Avenue. She brought coffee and portable chargers.
“I called work; I explained what’s going on,” she said. “Pretty much everybody’s out right now.”
Abbott works at the University of Pittsburgh’s pharmacy school in the Program Evaluation and Research Unit, helping people with substance abuse disordered.
“I’ve been working from home,” she said, despite not having power. “I would go into the office, but I can’t get out. I don’t know how long this will last.”
Abbott has a second car in her garage that the tree didn’t fall on, but the street was blocked by other trees
She is worried for her sister, who has brain cancer, however.
“She’s pretty stable, but I worry about if something happened,” Abbott said. “But we’d call an ambulance — they’d get her somehow.”
Removing trees
Don Stout was working with the Greater Pitt Tree Service LLC a few houses down on Milton Street Wednesday morning to remove a tree that had fallen on a home.
His team was set to tackle the other fallen trees on Milton Street as well.
“The crane is necessary to ensure that there’s no more extra damage done to the house,” Stout said. “We’re going to lift and remove things and strategically place them.”
The Greater Pitt Tree Service removes live, dead or hazardous diseased trees in Pittsburgh, and the company also covers plant health care and pruning in the region.
“It’s just not like one little community that got it,” he said of the damage. “Everyone got a piece.”
Normally, the company would remove the tree and then take the materials as well unless the contract stated leave the material for the property owner, but from Stout’s understanding, the local boroughs are coming around to collect the material that’s left over in the storm’s aftermath.
Instead, he said the team would get the tree off the house, cut it up and leave it to the side of the road for the borough.
In order for a local borough to remove a street tree, it takes some effort, Stout said, including paperwork.
The tree removal process in general can take many hours, according to Stout. The cost can range between $1,500 and $20,000 depending on the situation, how much equipment and employees are needed, and if they have to work around power lines
“It’s a lot of factors … it’s not cheap,” he said. “I mean, we have a million dollars in equipment here, plus 70 years of experience combined.”
A smaller tree in Abbott’s front yard is currently holding up the large, bee-infested tree that fell.
“I’m worried about my little tree,” Abbott said, as she had planted it a few years ago. “That’s holding the other tree in it that’s on top of car.”
Abbott’s next move for the time being is deciding what to eat for dinner.