A 20-year-0ld Mount Airy man was killed Thursday morning, when a tree fell onto his home, crashing the roof and walls and landing on the sleeping man.
Nicholas Manuel Rodriguez, 20, of 119 Boeing Lane, died instantly from injuries he received when the tree crushed him in his bed, according to John Shelton, Surry County EMS director and county medical examiner.
”The large tree feel across the mobile home in the bedroom area, where we found him,” Shelton said of the early morning incident.
Shelton, who said the call came in at 5:09 a.m., shortly after the incident occurred, said he, Mount Airy Rescue, Surry County EMS, and Ultimate Towing Service all arrived on the scene quickly, only to find Rodriquez deceased. Another occupant of the mobile home was in the opposite end of the structure at the time and was not injured.
”The night before we had a lot of wind, and we’ve had a lot of rain the last couple of days,” Shelton said. “I think it (the weather-induced stress) probably started breaking the root system yesterday, then last night we had more rain and it fell.”
Shelton said this is the second such incident this year, though when a tree fell on a mobile home in Dobson, a resident there was pinned under the tree but survived.
“This one, there was just too much of the weight on the deceased in this incident,” he said of the Thursday death.
In addition to the fatal tree fall Thursday, Shelton said his department, along with law enforcement, utility companies, and road crews, have been kept busy these past few days with continued rainfall and wind.
“The night before, we had 24 trees down through the night, with power outages. Last night and this morning, we had several trees down, some outages,” he said Thursday.
The outages, spread across the coverage areas of both Duke Energy and Surry-Yadkin Electric Membership Corporation, have in some cases left only a handful of customers without power, while other outages have affected hundreds. In most cases, power has been restored within a few hours of the initial outage.
Shelton said trees falling during periods of rain and wind is not a new phenomena.
“Those type trees, or any of those large type trees that have some age on them, there are several things to be aware of. How solid the root system is, how much rain we get, the wind they are exposed to. A lot of these large tree like that will just rot in the middle and break off. With this tree, it actually uprooted,” he said of the one which killed Rodriguez.
“You get any sort of wind whatsoever, when you have any kind of weight in the top of the tree, like this one had, and the ground soft because of the rain, and this happens.”
Aside from the fatal incident that claimed Rodriguez’s life, Shelton said most of the other weather-related incidents this week have been relatively minor, with crews having to remove fallen trees from roadways and power companies addressing the scattered power outages.
He said more problems may be on the way, however. He said the National Weather Service is predicting a total of 6 to 7 inches of rain this week for Surry County, and the area is now under a flood warning.
“We’re looking at streams over the next several days. The Ararat River always floods, it does quite a bit of damage in the city park area. Radar Road down in the Ararat Community, it always pretty much floods that entire road.”
He says other waterways to watch include those in the Stuart’s Creek area, the Yadkin River near Elkin, and Lovills Creek. He said the area around Lovills is supposed to be in a 100-year plain, which means, on average, it would flood once per century. However, Shelton said he’s seen the river rise to nearly spilling out of its banks several times in recent years and is concered about the river this week.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
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