Trees Fall on Homes, Roads in Montgomery County

“One of the scariest things I've seen in my life," Jamie Lee said.

She just happened to be standing at her kitchen window on Walhonding Drive in Bethesda, Md., when she saw the giant tree outside start to fall.

"All of a sudden I saw the land, the ground, just start to come up,” she said. “All the roots coming up, and boom, the tree went down right through our neighbor's house."

The tree slammed into a back second-story bedroom. 

Inside, a mother who says when she heard the boom, she ran to find her son. He was safely downstairs. Only after she brought firefighters back to the bedroom did she realize the tree came through the roof and had barely missed her.

Lee said that might be because the tree quietly fell.

“The ground was so saturated, it was like butter,” she said.

Across the county in Germantown, 66-year-old Mai Ai Lam-Phan of Clarksburg died when her 2003 Jaguar was hit head on by a 2005 Nissan Pathfinder, Montgomery County police said. The state health department said the crash was weather related, the Associated Press reported, but police said they’re still trying to investigate why the Pathfinder’s driver, 19-year-old Joshua Jose Munoz, crossed the double yellow line and hit the Jaguar.  Munoz and his 16-year-old passenger were transported to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

As of 6 p.m. Monday night, most creeks and streams in Montgomery County qwre beginning to swell but had yet to flood their banks. 

Roads, however, are shutting down as trees begin to fall, including a stretch of MacArthur Boulevard near Sangamore in Bethesda -- just a few blocks from Jaime Lee’s house.

"I'm very nervous,” she admitted. “We have huge trees in this neighborhood. A lot in the backyard. So I think we're going to be staying in the basement tonight."

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