Heather Gernack woke up just before 2 a.m. Sunday to the sound of wind picking up pine cones and pelting them at her house.
Then she heard a huge smash and jumped right out of bed.
“At first I didn’t see (what happened), because we had no power,” Gernack said, Monday morning. “At first I just through there was stuff on the deck.”
She grabbed a flashlight and cast light across the expanse of her West Kelowna Estates home and saw the unimaginable.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God—there is a tree in my dining room,'” she said.
Gernack has a lot of tall trees in her backyard, and it looks like a large chunk of one was ripped off in the windstorm and “shot into the ceiling like a javelin.”
When the storm subsided there was four feet of tree inside the house and another 20 feet poking out from the roof.
READ MORE: STORM KNOCKS OUT POWER
It’s going to be a costly problem to fix, she said, as she surveyed damage. But it could have been worse.
Had the tree pierced through the ceiling in her bedroom, it would have been deadly.
Throughout the neighbourhood, and the Okanagan in general, there was damage from the storm Environment Canada had forecast.
“It looks like a tornado hit our house — inside and out,” she said, noting that she will call in insurance later today. “But the rest of the nightboudhood is OK.”
DriveBC reported a tree down on Westside Road, 12 kilometres north of the junction of Highway 97 south, and crews shut down the road for most of the day while it was cleared.
FortisBC and BCHydro crews were also busy, dealing with multiple reports of lines down.
West Kelowna Fire Rescue responded to 13 incidents during the storm. A number of downed power lines were reported, also a number of calls about trees that landed on houses. One grass fire was reported in the Daimler Road area but a fire was not found.
And Kelowna crews were similarly busy with up to 80 calls for assistance with debris.
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