She’s lucky the limb only destroyed her van. Why Fort Mill woman says more will fall.

Brenda Cole gets it. Her storm didn’t have a name. Which in her eyes causes perhaps more concern, that it doesn’t take a catastrophic event to create danger in her neighborhood.

“My car is totaled,” Cole said. “I can't drive it. The axle is bent. The frame is bent.”

Cole watched as news outlets, geared for impacts from Hurricane Irma as its outer bands blew through the area, reported a car within sight of her home had a tree limb crash through its hood. The Herald reported the Sept. 11 incident within a couple of hours. There were power lines down and other storm damage elsewhere. But the car covered in trees and lumber on Grier Street offered an image of how severe strong wind and old trees can be.

Cole wasn’t surprised. She had the same misfortune not a few hundred feet from the site.

In mid-July, Cole was driving along Clebourne Street, between Founders Federal Credit Union and the Founder’s House. So was a hard rain. She stopped at the light. A violent gust of wind arose.

“I heard a loud crack and said ‘God, don't let it...,’” Cole said. “Before I could finish that prayer it came down and hit my car.”

A limb “as big as a small tree” barreled onto her Dodge Grand Caravan. The vehicle hasn’t been operable since, holed up at her son’s place in Rock Hill. Cole believes the property owner is responsible and hasn’t seen what she considers a fair compensation proposal for the vehicle. She continues meeting with an attorney to determine her next steps. Steps that, despite the headaches since, Cole is glad she still can take.

“It caught the top of it and rolled down,” she said. “If I’d been another foot up, it would’ve hit the top and we wouldn’t be talking.”

In South Carolina, fallen trees or limbs don’t necessarily make the property owner liable for damages. It has to be proven the property owner was negligent. Cole argues the tree that hit her car was rotten inside and that she told the property owners about it. Thus far she hasn’t filed suit for the damages, though she said she plans to.

In the meantime, Cole is concerned about her Skipper Street neighborhood. Both the tree-on-car incidents involved Springland, Inc. properties at the Founder’s House, but there are plenty of old oaks nearby. Cole guesses it was six months ago a large tree branch crashed through a fence. A neighbor of hers had a deck damaged twice by falling limbs. Cole had a tree in her own yard threatening her house. A nephew came by recently to take it down.

“These older trees, they’re just very hazardous,” Cole said. “And some of these people can’t afford to take them down.”

Born in the house where she now lives, Cole knows the area and its trees well. She recalls the row of oaks just opposite where the car was hit on Grier coming down during Hurricane Hugo decades ago. Some of the trees at the Founder’s House and nearby must be a century old or more.

“They were grown trees when I was little, and I’m 76 years old,” Cole said.

She isn’t the only one thinking about trees.

Fort Mill Town Council is working through a new set of building and development standards, a unified development ordinance. Most of the trees complaints the town gets involve development sites being clear cut and older trees coming down. Other times they hear from residents like Cole.

“I got several calls asking why we didn’t go in and take those trees out,” Mayor Guynn Savage said of the few days post-Irma, particularly with the tree that hit a car. “Well, it’s on private property.”

The town couldn’t go in and take down a tree on private property any more than a neighbor could. Even when the town takes land to put a road or utility project, the town has to buy the property first. Councilwoman Trudie Heemsoth said old trees are an issue where she lives, too, in Whiteville Park. Once, she said, someone contacted her after a neighbor took down at least part of what turned out to be healthy trees on nearby property.

“The person asked me if the town had any kind of tree policy,” Heemsoth said. “I get asked that a lot.”

The tree issue is tricky for public officials. For every neighbor who sees danger in a limb, there are neighbors like the ones who protested development on Kimbrell Road due to large oaks there. Oakland Pointe was delayed at the planning commission approval level over concern of two historic oaks central to the property. The developer said they needed to come down, while the commission wanted them to stay. One did, one didn’t. The developer also worked around another historic oak where a sidewalk would have gone.

Cole isn’t so concerned with larger policy issues. She just wants someone to pay to get her van replaced. And, to be able to walk through her neighborhood without concern of another falling limb.

“I just cringe when I walk under one of those trees,” she said, “because I never know when one’s going to fall on me.”

This story was originally published September 28, 2017 at 5:08 PM with the headline "She’s lucky the limb only destroyed her van. Why Fort Mill woman says more will fall.."