Tree Crushes Car in East Hampton During Back-End of Storm

Amy O'Sullivan thought the worst was over on Sunday afternoon and thought about leaving her East Hampton home to go into town. 

"Thank God I didn't," she said looking at her car with a large tree across the roof, crushing it and the back windshield completely shattered. "What if we were in the car? My kids sit in the backseat. They would have been dead." 

At about 4 p.m., the tree trunk came crashing on top of her Chevrolet and was laying on the roof of her house at 16 Hands Creek Road, near Cedar Street. 

She had parked the car on the front lawn. She said she thought it would be better off out of the driveway, where the electrical wires to the house cross right over from the street. 

She was taking a nap, trying to sleep off a headache, she said, from the added pressure in the air amid Irene, which had by that time been downgraded to a tropical storm.  

Her 14- and 11-year-old daughters were in the living room — one of them by the front window. "I thought it was thunder. My daughter said, 'No, a tree just came down on your car.'" 

"At one point, we started to smell gas. I think my gas tank leaked into the ground," she said, noting that she called the . "By the time the fire department came, you couldn't smell it anymore."

O'Sullivan said a landscaper told her the tree was dead — one of three town-owned trees on the edge of her property that are dead, she said.

"My mother told them years ago they were dead," she said pointing to the others. 

On Monday afternoon, she had already filed a claim with the town, though she decided not to wait for the 's office to come and declare the tree had to be moved. 

"I'm not going to risk my kids lives to wait for that to happen," she said, adding that she wasn't comfortable with only having one point of egress from the house in the back. 

"More than the car, I was worried about the house. The car is easier to replace," she said. 

The house, built in the 1960s, is owned by her grandmother, who lives in South Carolina, and once belonged to her great aunt. 

"It's sitting on the house," she said, though she couldn't be sure of the damage until it was removed. From the inside, she said, it didn't appear to be.

Her step-brother was going to attempt to cut down the branches so O'Sullivan could at least have access to the front door. The top of the tree was across the front of the house. 

Meanwhile the tree continued to press down on the car. "It's all gotten worse today," she said, pointing out a split in one of the higher, big branches coming out of the trunk. 

Still, they never lost power and or cable to the house. 

O'Sullivan had already taken care of the insurance claim on the car she has had for only 10 months. "I actually called them on Saturday and asked if a tree fell on my car was I covered," she said. She is.