Tree falls on vehicles in SE Portland

Hi, Jesse.  I regret that you are having to pay for the tow.  However, from the perspective of the officials engaged in the effort to restore electrical service and make the street safe, they needed all the cars that could possibly be moved out of the way.  I am temporarily in residence at the house across the street from your car where the tree fell on one of our cars, too. (The SUV in the photo on this page.) The officials asked me to move the car that was on the other side of the tree debris and I moved it to make space for them to work on the tree.  By the way, during all this time, the weight of the tree was resting on the network of cables that had not broken off the poles. Its weight pushed down so hard that directly in the front of this house the cable formed a "V" shape, which dipped down nearly to the roof of the garage in front of the house. The left front fender of your car had a portion of the tree leaning against it.  If they had not moved your car, it could possibly have been damaged much more as the tree was dismantled and brought off the cables to the ground. It seems remarkable to me that they were able to find a phone number for you and make the call they made.  If your phone hookup had been a regular land line, you may have been awaken by their call.

A tree branch breaking off and landing on an unoccupied vehicle is "breaking news"? I suppose if the vehicle were occupied and moving just before being hit, it would be breaking braking news? 

I live off 242nd and Stark here in Gresham (NE Hogan)....around 9 last night, everything went off with a loud bang.  My son in his room said he saw a series of very bright flashes west of us toward Portland.  Everything...242nd was like a black hole...no street lights, nothing.  My son called PGE on his cell and the recording said at that time there were 2, 680 customers currently without power.  We just moved into this apartment, and one thing I didn't stock up on were candles and flashlights...always on top of the list when we were in our house.  You can bet I'm doing that today. I just find it odd that a fallen tree on 18th and SE Stark could cause an outage way over here.  The recording with PGE said they didn't know what was the cause of the outage.  At any rate...stock up on your emergency things.  We were lucky in that power was restored just after midnight.  We could still be sitting here in the dark.

I was minding my own business, and you came on the air with breaking news.  I stopped and looked expecting something important, and you told me about a tree  that  had fallen on a car.  Are you kidding me!  It's time to reconsider what constitutes breaking news.