At around 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, the arm of a giant crane sliced through the home of Tracy Brubaker on South Pershing Avenue in Akron. "It was unbelievable to see, it's so huge, you can see the truck's like 30 feet in the air ... so it's something to see," said Brubaker's friend Ed Serdinak. Brubaker and Serdinak were watching from a neighbour's yard as work crews removed a giant tree.
"It died, it was like 100 or 125 foot tree and it was dead and so she didn't want it to fall on the house, so she hired a company to take the tree down, and the tree didn't hit the house, the crane did," he said. "I didn't know which house it was because Tracy and I went in together to take the tree down because it was between our houses," said next door neighbour Maryanna Johnson.
Ed says the workers told them the tree was too heavy to lift with the crane they had, so they were calling in a bigger one. "We went to lunch, we were walking back, we got about 20 feet away here and we saw the crane falling into the top of her house and crush her roof," Serdinak said. "They cabled the tree up top, they cut it, they were trying to get ready to lower it, they were preparing, and a gust of wind came, twisted the tree, lost the balance, the tree fell a little bit and it was enough of a yank to topple the crane," said Akron fire Capt. Mark Oziomek.
No one was hurt, since Tracy was advised not to be inside while the work was being done. About six hours later, the crane was removed from the home. "We haven't been on the inside of it because it hasn't been safe to get inside, but most likely the house is, if not totalled, pretty close to being totalled," said Oziomek. A representative from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration was on scene as part of the investigation into what went wrong.
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