Feature Article September 11, 2002
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The night of the storm; a thud and a rifle shot. An interview with Jackie Philpby David BrisonJackie Wickware Philp and her husband Doug have a cottage on Bennys Lake in Cloyne that was built by Jackies grandfather, Burt Wickware, in 1925. During the storm on Aug. 2, a large pine fell on the roof and seven pines hit the porch and grazed an adjacent bunkhouse. Fifty or 60 large pines, several of them more than four feet diameter, fell around the cottage, but miraculously, it is still standing, with only minor damage.
The Philps have been digging out with the assistance of local logger Gilles Paquet ever since. Gilles finished his work at the Wickware cottage on Thursday and moved his logging operation over to the Museum on Friday after working almost every day since the storm at the Wickware cottage.
The storm and what happened in the cottage is still fresh in Jackies mind. Her four year-old grandson Evan was at the cottage on the night of the storm. Jackie got up to shut the windows in the bedroom. The whole area was lit with lightning and the thunder was very loud. I remember thinking that this was something different from a usual storm, she said.
Events then moved fast and became even more threatening. She helped Doug shut the windows on the veranda and dining room. The rain was coming right in around the closed windows and the floor was quickly covered with water. There was the sound of objects hitting the roof -- Jackie thinks they might have been pines cones blown off the surrounding pines, but it might also have been the hail that accompanied the storm. By this time Evan had woken up and commented, Gee, it is really raining hard.
Jackie says, The next thing we heard was a loud thud, followed by what sounded like a rifle shot. The whole house shook and it felt like the ground was shaking too. Rain came through the roof in torrents and quickly flooded the dining room. There was a strong evergreen smell. The rifle shot was the pine hitting the roof. It turned out that the thud was the sound of all of the trees around the cottage falling at once. One of the largest trees (about 4.5 feet in diameter) was only three or four feet from the house it fortunately fell away from the house.
Jackie wanted to reassure her grandchild but also thought that they should get out of the house. She and Evan got buckets and along with Doug tried to put it under the streams coming in from the roof. I thought, We have to get out of here and I got shoes and a raincoat. All of a sudden, the rain stopped and it became very quiet. They stayed in the house and went back to bed. Later Steve Smart,from the volunteer fire department knocked on the window and asked if they were all right. The fire department was conducting a door-to-door check. It was very reassuring to hear Steves voice, Jackie said.
In the morning they were able to get a look at the damage. Seven trees were resting on the veranda and had just hit the edge of an adjoining bunkhouse taking the facia boards off and the edge of the roof. The large pine was across the roof of the cottage. There were trees everywhere it was four days before we could get the car [which was not damaged] out. A grove of large pine trees on a ten-acre lot adjacent to the cottage was blown down, resulting in a tangled mess, Jackie related.
An insurance adjuster was at the Wickware cottage on Friday. Murray Lessard, from Flinton, who has built additions to the cottage for the Philps, was there when the adjuster arrived. They were told to remove the tree and patch the holes in the roof. Murray did the repair and has also bid on the structural repair. The insurance company has to have two bids. The second bid had not yet been obtained and work had not started on the roof.
The scene when I visited late last Friday afternoon was remarkably tranquil considering what had happened on the night of the storm. The house was clean and tidy friends and relatives had arrived for pizza on the veranda. The cottage was very bright and airy. The late afternoon sun shone on the veranda. Jackie told me that formerly the veranda would have been in the shade.
Gilles Paquet was in the final stages of clearing the lot next to the museum. Those trees, just across the water and clearly visible from the Wickware cottage, caught the setting sun far before it finally sunk. The setting for the lovely Wickware cottage has been drastically altered and wont be the same for another 200 years the time it took for those trees to grow.
As Jackie related her story, Paquet and his crew felled a large tree in the museum lot and it hit the ground. Jackie was immediately and perceptibly alarmed, That is the sound I heard on the night of the storm, she said.
She will probably be alarmed when she hears a tree fall, or the sound of high swishing winds, for a long time.
