Nearly a dozen people escaped a giant tree slamming onto their cars in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park Monday.
At about 4 p.m., a 130-foot-tall eucalyptus tree came down across Crossover Drive near 19th Avenue.
Five cars with 11 people inside were impacted.
Sandy Yeung was inside her blue Tesla when the tree came down. She said her first thought was, “Seriously, are we dead?”
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“We have a glass rooftop and this big tree and lamp post came crashing down and you hear this big boom and all the windows cracked,” she said. “My first reaction was, ‘is there blood?” Because there was glass everywhere.”
Yeung looked and saw that she, her daughter, son and husband were unscratched. And, except for two minor injuries, so were the seven other people in the four other cars, also hit by the massive tree.
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A San Francisco Fire Department spokesperson said this story easily could’ve had a tragic ending.
“I think it’s important to note that these vehicles were in motion when this tree fell down and had the tree fallen a second later, we would be looking at a much worse scene behind us than what we are seeing right now,” said SFFD Captain Jonathan Baxter.
No word yet from the city on why the entire tree toppled out of the blue.
Initially, the tree blocked all lanes of Highway 1 through Golden Gate Park, but soon a couple of northbound lanes were opened.
The three southbound lanes remain closed for hours, causing a massive traffic jam all around that section of Golden Gate Park.
Crews came out to cut up the tree, load it on trucks and get it out of here and all of a sudden, just like that, Golden Gate Park was back to normal and looking like nothing had ever happened.
But Yeung knows otherwise.
“Somebody was telling me we have a guardian angel watching over all of us today,” she said.
