Running people and a dull blow, that was the picture on Friday evening a little after six in a parking lot in Hoeven. A giant tree fell out of nowhere, took two other trees and landed on thirteen parked cars. Ton Snorrewind and his wife escaped unscathed by luck. Their car was buried under the tree.
Five cars were completely destroyed by the fallen trees, eight other cars were badly damaged.
“We were very lucky that we were shopping and were not already in the car”, Ton Snorrewind from Oudenbosch begins his story. “Here a few minutes earlier and we wouldn’t have been there.”
“I wouldn’t be standing here now.”
Their story is bizarre. In the supermarket they didn’t have the carton of milk that Ton always buys. “They had a new carton of milk and it was not registered in the cash register. Things blocked. The manager was called in and the whole thing lasted one or two minutes. So we arrived ‘too late’ at the car”, he says on Saturday morning. “If we had bought a normal carton of milk, we would have been in the car when that tree fell. Then I wouldn’t be here now.”
Yet Ton does not consider himself the most fortunate. “That is a father with his daughter. He was just loading his groceries into his car. He heard some creaking, looked up and saw the whole tree coming towards him.” The man managed to run away with his daughter just in time. “His shopping cart, including groceries, was flat. There was nothing left of that.”
When Ton left the supermarket he heard people calling for ambulances, fire brigade and police. “I didn’t think anything at all for a while, you only see a great deal of havoc.” For a moment he had the hope that his car would not have been hit. “We just had a new electric car for eight months, which is very sour.”
Ton and his wife are in Hoeven on Saturday morning to ‘secure the insurance’. “There was not a breath of wind on Friday. You can see that the tree had no more roots. That tree must have just been sick,” he says. “The municipality says they recently checked all the trees.” To prove that the municipality has not done this check properly, pictures are taken of the fallen tree and roots. “It is very difficult to show that the municipality was negligent. We have to prove that the tree was sick, otherwise we won’t get a cent.”
“I immediately thought there had been casualties.”
Claudia lives opposite the parking lot and nothing is left of her car either. She is very sober about it a day later. “I was just walking through the woods when I saw the trees coming towards me. That’s not good, I immediately thought. We were just in the right position, others came running towards us.”
She said it was over in seconds. “It was a loud bang and we all saw leaves coming towards us. I immediately thought there had been casualties.” Her husband immediately came to the rescue. “He went to see if there were people under the trees or if there were still people in the cars. Fortunately that was not the case.”
Images of the falling tree:
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