Photo: ABC 11
A North Carolina family is lucky to be alive after a tree toppled onto their Raleigh home on Saturday as the remnants ofHurricane Florencecontinued to devastate parts of the Carolinas.
“I guess we can attest to the fact that he was on the mattress and had a little dampening effect when the tree came down on him,” Schultz told the station.
The man was not seriously injured and everyone in the house — five people — made it out and went to a relative’s home, according toWNCN.
Durham Highway Fire Department officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment from PEOPLE.
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Just hours later, another unnamed Raleigh family suffered a similar situation. A couple and three children were unharmed when a tree crashed into the center of their mobile home, according toWRAL. The mother said she and her family had just moved into the home less than a month ago.
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“It’s horrible … you’ve worked a lot to be able to have your own home and then for [it]… to be destryoyed and to not have anything again,” she told the station. “Words can’t describe how it feels to lose everything.”
The family of five was not injured.
The slow-moving storm began at sea as a Category 4 hurricane, andmade landfall as a Category 1 hurricane on Friday. It has since been downgraded to a tropical depression and, as of Monday, was focused in Kentucky with winds reduced to 25 mph, according to theNational Weather Service.
However, although the storm lost its strength over the weekend, the death toll as a result of the hurricane continued to rise.
At least 20 people have died storm-related deaths since the hurricane made landfall,according to CNN. On Sunday night, a 1-year-old died in rushing floodwaters in Union County, North Carolina,WSOCreported. Just hours earlier, a 3-month-old was killed when a tree fell on the family’s home, according toWLS.
source: people.com
