With wind gusting up to 60 miles per hour, local trees that normally only see 10-15 mph wind, couldn’t handle the pressure.
In Sutter Street, an old cedar tree in the 400 block, came crashing down, completely blocking Sutter Street. The old tree was about 30 inches in diameter. Luckily, no people or major property was damaged. Just a short time earlier, a car had been parked on the street exactly where the tree fell.
The tree was in the front yard of Gene Mendonca, almost on the property line with neighbors “Dirty Sallie” Brooks and “Mean Mo” Jauregui. The tree would often drop limbs and Gene wanted to take it down, but apparently the city judged it safe and wouldn’t allow that. It turns out the roots were extremely shallow, so Saturday’s winds were able to fell the tree.
Early that morning, Mo went out to get the paper and he noticed a limb had fallen off the tree. Mo removed the limb from the road and raked up the debris. During the morning, he went out a few times, to keep the road clear.
After a short time, Sallie had a strange feeling about the tree and went outside to see Mo. She told him she felt like the tree would fall and she was feeling uneasy about him being so close to it. He came in and then down it went.
The strange thing was that there was no groundshaking crash. Sallie says she grew up in Oregon in an area where they felled a lot of trees and they would cause the ground to shake. This tree didn’t do that. It may have been because the roots held on long enough to make it a more gentle fall.
It was so quiet that Gene slept right through it.
After it was down, the city sent out a crew, with massive front-end loaders and saws, who had it cleared up in just a few hours.
Around the corner in Coloma Street, another beautiful, but smaller cedar, around 15 inches in diameter started leaning in the wind. Deino Trotta, owner of the amazing Gingerwood house saw it leaning and placed orange cones on the roadway to prevent cars entering the area where it might fall. While Deino was around the front side of the property, securing another tree to his truck, to prevent it falling, the cedar in Coloma Street fell over.
While Deino was cutting up the fallen tree, his new neighbor, Jason, came over and helped cut it up and get it off the road. Shortly after it was all off the road, a Folsom road crew came to clean up, but they were too late. Instead, they went to the 300 block of Figueroa street, where another large tree had come down.
Around in that block, the roadway was under water, as it always is, whenever it rains. The drainage is such that water pools on the corner, completely covering the road where the stop line is.
Also in this area of Folsom, the power was out from around 10:30am to 6pm. Several people heard two large explosions and we were told one transformer caught fire and was replaced.
It was a wild day, but we needed the rain.
