BEDFORD, Va. – Crews were busy cleaning up after Tuesday’s storms knocked down massive trees in the town of Bedford.
Some of the trees are large enough that it will take crews days to cut them up and remove them.
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“Well, this will be a couple of days, I’m guessing, today and tomorrow,” said Mike Waldo, a town of Bedford street crew supervisor.
Not far away, a huge Oak tree fell on an SUV parked in a yard, but fortunately, it missed the house. The vehicle is damaged, but no one was hurt - though a family member had been parked there just minutes before.
Harvey Mattson, whose son owns the house, said the car moved only five to ten minutes before the tree fell.
Mattson and a co-worker measured the tree. It was four and a half feet in diameter. They were cutting up sections of the tree that were up to three feet thick. But they said they would eventually need professional help.
“We’ll have to get we’ll have to get a truck in or something,” Mattson said.
At the Oakwood Cemetery, crews were cutting up another massive tree.
Surveillance video from a convenience store across the street showed near white-out conditions just before the tree fell.
The crew was hindered by working over graves.
"If all these graves were not here it’d be real simple. You just cut it, push it, we’d be able to use machinery, backhoe, stuff like that but like I said with the graves here it makes it difficult," Waldo said.
Nick Soukhanov lost a similar-sized tree on his property. Another fell near his home behind the former middle school.
“I felt the barometer drop. Heard the wind. Looked out the window. There it went,” he said.
Social media was thick with pictures from the storm – including images that may show a funnel cloud, but experts say it’s unlikely that the cloud is what did the damage on the ground.
“The weather service is not investigating to see if there was a tornado, which suggests the damage was done by straight-line winds,” said 10 News Chief Meteorologist Jeff Haniewich. He said that the photos circulating on social media of a funnel cloud appeared to be legitimate.
Haniewich said that a funnel cloud is not a tornado unless it touches the ground. So far, there is no indication that the damage in Bedford is consistent with tornado damage.