Whether by sheer happenstance or a watchful guardian angel, a Sundre resident and her daughter feel fortunate that only a Jeep was written off by powerful overnight winds that felled a massive tree on their southeast property.
During the early morning hours of Tuesday, Aug. 20 when there was nary a hint of light in the sky, strong winds suddenly swept through the area and later subsided almost as quickly as they had manifested.
But it didn’t take long for wind gusts that reached almost 75 kilometres per hour to exert their impact.
Daris Kieley, who was sleeping soundly in her holiday trailer that was parked on her mom Lorrie Hamilton’s property in the southeast part of town not far from Highway 760 or the Bergen Road, found herself startled wide awake.
“I woke up at 4 a.m. and heard the crack of a tree,” Kieley told the Albertan the following day on Aug. 21.
“And right away I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t wanna be in this yard full of trees.’”
Struggling to see clearly in the near-pitch black, Kieley said she could not immediately ascertain the source of the disconcerting noise she had just heard nor what had just happened.
“It was super windy,” she said.
“The trees were swaying circularly – they weren’t going like back and forth. So right away, my brain was like, ‘I’m in a tornado – I don’t know what’s going on. I need to get to the house.’ So, I bolted to the house,” she said.
“It wasn’t a tornado, but it certainly felt like one.”
After reaching the relative safety of her mom’s house, Kieley said she took a brief moment to catch her breath and then proceeded to take a peak out the back door’s window. That’s when she saw the massive tree resting atop her mom’s Jeep and heaved a sigh of relief.
“The tree, if it would’ve went a different direction, I would’ve been crushed. If it would’ve went another direction, it would’ve landed on mom’s bedroom,” she said.
“We were are all so lucky that nobody was injured or dead, because it really could’ve come either direction. So, we were very thankful it just took the Jeep out.”
Hamilton, who has called Sundre home since moving to town in 2014, also offered her account of the ordeal during an interview with the Albertan.
“It was more Daris’s experience,” she said, candidly confessing that she hadn’t even heard a thing and slept through it all.
“I woke up on my own about 5 (a.m.),” she said.
“As soon as I come out of my bedroom door, she was in the house because she was too scared to be outside,” said Hamilton, adding, “And she said, ‘A tree fell on your Jeep!’ and I didn’t believe her.”
After being prompted by Kieley to have a look for herself, Hamilton looked outside.
“I look out the back door and there’s this big, huge tree on my Jeep,” she said.
“I kind of went into a shock mode, you know? Like, you just don’t know how to think or feel. I got upset, because it could’ve landed the other way and killed my daughter,” she said.
After reflecting for a few moments as to how the situation could have turned out far worse, Hamilton said she felt a wave of relief wash over her.
“I just felt so blessed,” she said, adding the house wasn’t so much as nicked.
“It missed everything but my Jeep – it’s a write off,” she said, adding she was anticipating a temporary replacement rental car through insurance coverage.
“What saved it from really being squished, is the fact that Jeeps have those big roll bars in them. But the roof and the windshield and the back door – it’s a four-door – and all the doors, all that’s wrecked.”
As fate would have it, Tuesday, Aug. 20 was also the birthday of Kieley’s late nephew, Adam Cripps, who in 2014 died at the young age of 16 following a lifelong struggle against cancer. Kieley, who is the president of the Adam’s Army Charitable Foundation and event organizer of a music festival fundraiser in his memory called Adamstock, had been in town for this year’s event that had just wrapped up days before.
“We feel he was looking out for us,” said Hamilton, taking a moment to compose herself through a momentary surge of emotion.
“I still think about it and how it could have killed her, because if it would’ve went the other way, it would’ve got her for sure,” she said.
“Somebody was watching over us. Is it a coincidence that it was on Adam’s birthday? We have our boy in heaven looking out for us.”
According to data gathered by a weather station at the Sundre Airport and posted on the government of Canada’s website, wind speeds as of roughly 3 a.m. were registering at barely seven kilometres per hour.
But by the next reading at about 4 a.m., the station had begun to register a sustained wind speed of 45 kph with gusts blowing as high as 73 kph. The storm had already begun to subside within the hour and by 5 a.m., sustained winds were back down to 18 kph with gusts still occasionally reaching 57 kph. An hour later, it had completely passed. Visit www.weather.gc.ca for more information and updates on conditions at the local airport.
The massive tree had since been removed from the Jeep when Kieley shared her story.
“Every time I come out here and I just keep looking at this stump, and I’m like ‘Oh my god. Man, I’m lucky,’” she said.
“I’m not a huge, huge believer in all of that stuff,” she said referring to divine intervention or guardian angels.
Yet should couldn’t help shake the feeling that “somebody was watching, man.”