Fox 9 News: Only Slightly Misleading!

So on Tuesday night the local Fox affiliate had two vans, a towering antenna, bright lights, and the talent (Maury Glover) all set up to show the debris from trees on our front lawn. The debris was used to illustrate a story about recent thunderstorm damage. This was slightly misleading. Here's the backstory.

On Saturday morning at 3:23 a.m. (I woke up immediately) half of the giant tree in our BACK yard fell directly between our shed and our house, a perfect fall for which we are very thankful. It crushed a third of our back yard fence and took out our power, phone, and cable lines. Our usual friendly contractor, who built our bedroom addition and deck, had a crew out chopping up the fallen half and taking down the remaining half of the tree the next day. A tree in our FRONT yard, untouched by the storm, had a similar trunk "fault line" and was deemed likely to fall on the house in a similar future storm, so we had them start taking that one down too.

By Tuesday evening they had done quite a number on it and its branches were scattered around the front yard. This is the debris you see surrounding and menacing the Fox 9 reporter. If they had panned up only a LITTLE bit higher, you would have seen the suspiciously neat cuts of the chainsaws. It was definitively not storm debris and these particular branches had actually damaged nothing. He does say "branches like these" did the damage, so it's not technically an inaccurate report.

It was exciting to see our house on TV and we would have taped it except that, of course, our cable is still out and our VCR doesn't do so well with the plain old airwaves.

Watch the story!

Happy Elvis Week everybody!