A massive tree crashed directly onto an Excelsior Springs home on Tuesday night, merely moments after the Bishop family escaped their bedroom to find safety in the basement. Luckily, everyone made it out without any injuries.
Brent Bishop, who serves as the city’s assistant public works director, mentioned that he and his wife, Jill, were walking toward the basement stairs right when they heard the tree slam into their house.
“It went through where we were, our bedroom , it went through the ceiling. It punctured it,” Brent said. “Water just started rolling in.”
“This is our bedroom,” Jill said. “That’s where we were lying like seconds before it hit.”
Stepping outside, they finally saw the true scale of the devastation.
“I didn’t even realize how big that tree was until it was lying on the ground,” Brent said.
The falling timber crushed the home’s air conditioning unit underneath its weight. Crews cannot assess the full scope of the structural and utility damage until they haul the giant tree away.
“A lot of people are like, ‘Is it in the house?’ Yeah, it’s in the house because they can’t see it. It’s all underneath the tree,” Brent said. “It’s going to be a long road.”
Even through the wreckage, Jill focused on the bright side and shared her gratitude.
“We had guardian angels looking over us,” she said. “You’re very grateful, but then you still look at it just going, ‘my gosh, we got a lot to do’.”
The storm left a wide path of destruction all over Excelsior Springs. Drawing on his public works background, Brent drove through town and spotted countless barricaded streets.
“It was pretty bad. It was hard to get around, even to show people where the debris was bad, because you would drive down one block and that’s blocked. You drive, go around the corner and go somewhere else and that’s blocked,” Brent said.
Dispatchers picked up hundreds of emergency calls all through the evening.
Ryan Dowdy with the Excelsior Springs Police Department summed up the night quite simply.
“Crazy,” Dowdy said. “The dispatch center was getting inundated with calls, 911 calls, people reporting trees down, you know, small fires from electrical power lines or transformers. So it was busy.”
“Over the course of those four hours, five hours, I never once heard the 911 phone stop ringing,” Dowdy said.
Another falling tree wedged itself right between the neighboring properties of Thalia Harris and Rick Holman, leaving both homes damaged.
“It sounded like a freight train had come through,” Thalia Harris said. “The whole house shook.”
Harris noted that her family found themselves trapped behind their front door until response crews showed up with chainsaws to clear a path.
“When I saw the damage done, I can’t even think about it, or I’m gonna start crying. But yeah, it just, it broke my heart,” Harris said.
Right next door, Rick Holman shared his own sense of helplessness.
“It just feels like you want to do something and there’s really nothing you can do until you get people here to do it.”
Even with the property damage, Holman expressed immense relief alongside his neighbor.
“We really feel blessed that it went between our house and the neighbors because it could have taken out either one of our houses,” Holman said.
