When Nature Attacks

I used to love those commercials for the When Animals Attack! videos, you know, the ones where a deer gets pissed off because the hunter is drunk and can't shoot straight so it decides to beat the crap out of him. Or when, as Chris Rock says in lampooning the Sigfried and Roy debacle, that the tiger went tiger.
Nature decided to fight back this time, right down the street from my house. A family saw that their tree was leaning a little too much, so they called in a specialist to cut down the tree (which was a solid 40-feet tall at least. The morning it was to be cut down, the specialist called and said the winds were too high, making it unsafe for the cutters to go up in the crane. So they postponed it for a day.

Less than 2 hours after the call was made, the tree decided it had had enough and went hari kari, crushing the fence, taking out some powerlines and blocking the street for about 27 hours (click the photo to embiggen). Amazingly, and thankfully, no one was hurt and the tree actually fell right in between the two houses on the other side of the street, only breaking a couple windows and tearing up some shingles.

Of course, in Takoma Park (or Middle Earth, as Kelly calls it), this became the Sight of The Day, and everyone within a mile radius had to come over and check out the tree. And then they all rushed home and started calling arborists to check on their trees. Because you never know when trees decide to not take it anymore. And then they fight back.