A towering tree crashed into a brick house in Birmingham, Ala., during a powerful storm on Thursday evening, killing two young girls and injuring three other people, the authorities said.
The girls, a 3-month-old and a 3-year-old, were pronounced dead at the scene, Battalion Chief Sebastian Carrillo of the Birmingham Fire and Rescue Service said. An 11-year-old boy and two women sustained “significant” injuries, he added, while five other people who were in the house escaped unharmed. The relationships among those involved were unclear.
Chief Carrillo said he did not know the type of tree that had fallen but described it as “a lot taller than a telephone pole” and as thick and wide as a “small sedan.”
The two women who were injured were found near each other on the ground floor, trapped under the tree, Chief Carrillo said. One of them, he continued, was sitting in a recliner. To avoid injuring them further, the authorities extricated them from under the tree by cutting out the floor beneath them and lowering them into netting installed in the basement, Chief Carrillo said.
The episode occurred early Thursday evening as a strong storm, which included lightning, swept through the Birmingham area, bringing heavy rain and winds of up to 70 miles an hour, according to the National Weather Service, which urged people to stay off the roads. More than 50,000 people were without power on Thursday night, according to an outage map.
Chief Carrillo said that the storm had dumped a lot of rain on Birmingham in a short amount of time, which had led to flooding.
Residents of the house where the tree fell — in the west Birmingham neighborhood of College Hills — heard a “large boom” that they took to be lightning hitting the tree, Chief Carrillo said. That is when five of the 10 people inside the home managed to escape.
The authorities were alerted by a 911 call at 5:35 p.m., on which a woman yelled that she could not breathe and that she and other people were trapped.
The Birmingham authorities know how to deal with trees falling on homes during storms, Chief Carrillo said, but he added that in a 28-year career as a firefighter, this episode seemed exceptional because of the number of people who had to be attended to.
“I don’t remember as many people being involved in one of these rescues,” he said.
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