Home cleaved and crushed, Putnam family escapes alive

At 1:20 a.m. last Thursday, the Johnson family of Hickory Point Drive in northeast Putnam County lived through a nightmare that many others have no doubt considered but prayed never to experience.

All snug in their beds while a windy rainstorm raged outside, their slumber was shattered when a huge tree, more than 70 feet tall, suddenly fell and crashed through their home’s roof.

“It was a noise like I couldn’t explain. It sounded like a freight train or a missile had hit the house,” Johnny Johnson recalled just a few hours later.

“We (he and his wife, Kimberly) were okay, but I just jumped up and the first thing I said was, ‘I’ve got to see my son,’” Johnson continued, his voice cracking as he fought back tears at the memory. “I honestly didn’t know what I was going to see.”

The couple’s 22-year-old son, Branson, had been sleeping in the bedroom at the rear of the home, directly below the tree’s path as it smashed its way through a new roofing job installed just a couple of months earlier. It collapsed the ceiling to within a yard above the bed, littering insulation everywhere. Thankfully, mercifully, no limbs speared the room.

“Honestly, I just did not think. It was just straight survival instinct, I booked it out the door,” Branson said. “I didn’t know what happened at first but figured out pretty quick it was the tree.”

The tree was there when the Johnsons moved in with Branson as a baby. Alongside many others on the heavily forested lot, it had stood strong through many squalls in the past, several more violent than last week’s storm. 

It stood on land significantly sloping away from the house, too, suggesting it “should” have fallen down the hill, but the wind, reported as gusting up to 40-plus miles per hour that night, simply pushed it over and down.

Johnson, who works as a field superintendent for Pye Barker Fire and Safety, credits Horton Homes for building a strong modular structure that undoubtedly saved his son’s life. Had it not stopped the tree’s fall, he said he doesn’t even want to think about the alternative.

For now, he, Branson, and Kimberly, who owns a licensed home cleaning service, will be put up in a Greensboro hotel provided through their Farm Bureau home insurance. 

Depending on how long it will take to repair – or replace – the structure, they may soon be moved into a longer-term home rental.

David Hardin of Crown Disaster Management was onsite barely 12 hours after the tree fell, evaluating the damage, preparing a report to help plan the next steps for remediation and/or repair, and arranging to have the tree cut up and removed from the roof on Friday. 

He noted the foundation had suffered several visible cracks and breaks but couldn’t truly assess the damage until it was safe to enter the crawlspace.

Regardless, Hardin stressed, the next steps would be determined through insurance. Beyond her family’s safety, that’s what Kimberly Johnson is most thankful for in going through this ordeal.

“Thank God we’re all okay; it really is like an act of God that we’re all safe. Everyone should thank God every day that they’re alive,” she said. “But I also want to let people know they need to keep their insurance up on their home, their cars, their lives, because you just never know what’s going to happen. This is bad and it was really scary, but we’ll be okay. If we didn’t have the insurance, though, I can’t even imagine what could happen. Really, thank God we are so lucky in so many ways.”