Terrifying moment when tree, power line fall in front of moving car caught on dashcam
A Louisiana man is thankful to be alive after a storm caused a tree to come crashing down just feet in front of his car, dashcam video showed.
Andy Daray, a resident of Walker, drove to Covington on July 16 to buy a fishtank from a family that was moving, he told McClatchy News in a Facebook message.
“Nice, pretty day other than very hot, when I left the house about noon,” he said. “About the time I arrived at their house dark clouds had been forming to the north.”
Daray loaded the fishtank and its stand onto an open trailer he was pulling with his 2023 Toyota 4Runner and started the drive home when it began to sprinkle.
“By the time I made it to the front of his neighborhood (2-3 minutes) it was coming down like crazy with winds blowing wild,” he said. “Pine cones and small branches were pelting the road.”
Moments later, a tree suddenly came crashing down. The terrifying moment was captured on his dashcam.
“The dashcam has a wider view than I did. I didn’t see the top of the tree until half a second before impact,” he said. “Literally I saw tree, electricity, BOOM!”
The tree landed on the road just feet in front of his car, taking a power line down, before Daray crashed into the tree.
Electricity from the power line arced to the ground, Daray said, and was captured in the video.
“Best I could tell afterwards, the tree tangled in the lines and when I hit it, the force swung it upward where it cleared the rest of the 4Runner and trailer before crashing down in the road,” Daray said.
Just a few minutes behind Daray on the road was a police officer, he said. The officer called EMS and the fire department because “he thought he had come up on a fatality or something serious,” Daray said.
Daray said the power line didn’t come down completely, so there wasn’t a live wire on the ground and he was able to get out of his car safely.
His car, which had just crossed the 5,000-mile mark on its odometer, was totaled, but miraculously Daray was left without a scratch.
“A second later I might have been a tree hugger,” he said.
The crash occurred in Covington, about 40 miles north of New Orleans.
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