My Neighbors Tree Fell on My Shed
I look out my patio door and all I can see is a tree that seems to have taken over most of my back yard. A neighbor is now yelling to see him I am hurt. I let him know that I am okay and now the two of us stand there and we just stare at it on the ground. He tells me he needs to head off to work and says how sorry he is that this just happened. I am alone again. I stare at the tree and I am still a bit shaky. While I am starring at it, I realize that it not only is taken over most of my yard but it has totally destroyed my outdoor shed. I notice the huge hole in my yard from when it landed and then I see it. My fence is damaged that surrounds my property but this is not even my tree. It is a neighbors tree!
I called my husband at work and he immediately came home to see what had happened. I got my camera and I just started clicking. I think the more photos I took, the more upset I was becoming. Not even our tree, I kept thinking. This is not our fault, it is not our tree. My husband grabs the camera and he goes around the fence and takes photo of the remainder of this tree that is still in the ground. He then comes back and he says, “ants, ants, thats why this happened to our yard and our shed, ants!” The neighbors tree had been eaten away by ants and it finally just couldn’t stand up any longer, so it fell in my yard.
Hubby called the insurance agent thinking he would say that it is covered on the neighbors policy but it was not. When a neighbors anything falls on your property, the claim is filed under your own homeowners insurance. A few days went by and we had to leave it the way it was for the insurance adjuster to see it all. We made a list of what we believed was in the shed. He arrived and hooked up his laptop in my dining room and then attached his printer to it. Yes, it was now a mini-office. He totaled everything up and he gave us a number. This was the number that he would be writing us a check for but minus our $500 deductible and minus depreciation of everything that was damaged and would now need replaced.
We asked our insurance representative how we could prevent this sort of thing in the future. He told us that when we are concerned about something on a neighbors property, we need to write them a letter, keep a copy, and mail it to them. This way we have proof that we tried to avoid something like this happening. We also asked the representative why we have to pay $500 when it wasn’t our tree that fell? He said that our insurance company would go after the neighbors insurance company and if they won, we would receive a check in the mail. Around six months later we received a letter from the insurance company. They did not win, there would be no $500 check for us.
What a mess we were left with? Our neighbor basically hid the whole time. We did nothing wrong yet we were left with a huge tree on the ground in our backyard and a destroyed shed and fence to deal with all because our neighbor didn’t know his entire tree was dying from ants.
I now look differently at the trees that are near my property that could potentially fall down and land in my yard. They are no longer beautiful to me, a homeowner that ran from a falling tree. I look at them and I think, that’s $500, that’s $500, that’s another $500. Well, you know, should they fall. There are now nine potential trees that surround my property that could fall in my backyard and ruin a nice quiet day for me.
