The Hanover Springs Oak Bows Out With A Bang

By Andrew Gorosko

“I heard a crash. There was a big crash. I thought it was lightning. I looked out the window. The tree was gone,” said Michael Dutton, recalling the early morning hours of Friday, May 4.

The landmark tree to which Mr Dutton refers was a broad, tall overarching northern red oak, an historical tree well over 300 years old, which had stood alongside remote Pond Brook Road, a narrow dirt road that curls through the woods along Pond Brook.

At 3:13 am that morning, Newtown police alerted the town emergency dispatch center that the mighty Hanover Springs Oak had fallen. Hawleyville firefighters were dispatched to the scene.

The firemen found that the towering tree, which had grown weak with age, had simply fallen down for lack of support. The tree’s interior had crumbled, having grown black with decay.

Portions of the tree fell back away from the road, striking and crushing the roof of the circa-1866 farmhouse at 32 Pond Brook Road.

Other sections of the tree fell away in the opposite direction, landing across narrow Pond Brook Road and across a steep field beyond that dirt road. Downed utility lines lay tangled amid the wreckage.

Fortunately, neither Michael Dutton, nor his wife, Susan, nor Michael’s son, Andrew, were injured in the incident. They had been asleep in bed when it occurred.

The fallen tree which struck the white two-story farmhouse had come closest to Andrew’s upstairs bedroom. Its fall destroyed the kitchen and dining room in a single-story wing of the house. It heavily damaged the main two-story section of the building.

Utility crews picked through the downed lines. A tree crew began cleanup work.

Inside the farmhouse, a surreal, chockablock tangle of tree limbs and branches, interspersed with budding oak twigs and fragments of building material, occluded what had been a pastoral view from the living room’s bay window.

The view from the living room into what had been the dining room was no view at all, just a jumble of fallen tree limbs illuminated by sharp sunlight pouring down through the breached roof above.

A film of fine white dust covered everything within the building.

The family’s two dogs, Shadow and Zoner, were uninjured in the tree’s crash. It was six hours after the calamity that the Duttons located their pet cat, Zoe, unhurt amid the wreckage, but cowering after a most harrowing experience.

“We’d like to come back here,” Michael Dutton said, while inspecting the wreckage. Although the family lost some personal items, the items were insured, he said.

“These things happen,” he said.

“We’re all alive… You do what you need to do to keep going. I’ve been through worse,” Mr Dutton said.

The impressive tree had a nearly six-foot diameter and an 18-foot circumference. The specimen possessed a spread of 132 feet. It was registered as a historic tree in 1975 with the American Forestry Association, with plaques attesting to its historic value.

“There were no injuries. It was miraculous,” said Gary Tannenbaum, who owns the farmhouse in which the Duttons have lived in since July 1999.

Michael Dutton said Monday that because the Pond Brook Road home is now unlivable, he and his family are staying at his mother-in-law’s home in South Salem, N.Y., in Westchester County.

“There’s a lot of damage. The more we looked, the more [damage] we found,” he said.

Mr Dutton said that his family was very fortunate that the tree fell just as it had. Had the tree fallen just a few feet away from where it dropped, it would have spelled tragedy for his sleeping family, he said.

Fred Hurley, the town’s director of public works, said the fallen tree was a town-owned tree due to its location adjacent to Pond Brook Road.

“The good news is nobody got hurt,” Mr Hurley said.

The insurance companies that provide coverage will resolve liability questions, he said. 

Mr Dutton said Wednesday, “It’s a little more loss than I thought” of the damage to his family’s possessions.

“We still don’t know where we’re going to be day to day,” he said of the calamity’s effect on his family’s life.

Mr Dutton said he hopes that by the end of May, his family has at least partial use of the house. He added the family hopes to move back to the house full-time after the damage is repaired.