A severe storm stomped through Chelsea Sunday evening. Its effects were minimal in my area outside town, but that wasn’t the case in the city. A number of large trees went down, some of which used houses to cushion their fall. When I was driving through town, I noticed a crew hard at work dealing with one such tree:

I don’t know if you would go home, grab your camera, and head back to watch the crew work, but obviously, that’s exactly what I did. What? Leave me alone. IT’S NEWSWORTHY.

The size and position of the tree made it a more difficult job requiring heavier equipment, so they brought in a large crane to lift the tree off the house piece by piece.

All of that got lowered to the crew on the ground running the chipper.

That rather large machine made quick work of the tree.

Not once but twice while I was there, a Google Street View car drove by.

Once enough of the smaller foliage on the house was out of the way, the crew got to work on removing one of the large limbs precariously bridging the gap between the tree and the house.

As they approached the ground, they revealed the reason the tree had been susceptible to the storm: it was hollow.

With one limb on the ground, the crew began preparing to work on the second limb.

The work drew a crowd.

As the crew cleared more and more of the tree, some of the damage to the house became visible.

The house withstood the tree’s assault surprisingly well! It removed a few bricks from the chimney (as seen in the above photo), it rumpled a few shingles, and it cracked a few rafters. Despite that, the roof still kept out the rain! Let’s hear it for well-built houses.

Finally, the crew began to remove the last big limb.

With the heavy sections of the tree on the ground, the man in the bucket raked the rest of the tree off the roof.