Strong winds snapped an enormous branch off a tree and sliced a Douglas, Massachusetts, family's home in two while their young children slept inside overnight.
"It split my house right in half!" homeowner Troy Kibbe said Friday morning, outside his now-uninhabitable home.
Amazingly, Kibbe's 4-year-old daughter Elaina and 3-year-old son Troy Jr. slept through the unexpected incident and woke up to branches, wood and insulation everywhere.
"Boom!" said Troy, Jr. describing the fall.
Elaina added, "And a tree go fall, go boom!"
Perhaps even more amazingly, the tree fell right were Kibbe's friend, Greg Lyness, has been sleeping, but by pure luck, Lyness was out that night.
"That’s exactly where I would have been sleeping this morning, so I feel like I escaped death, or God or somebody helped me," Lyness said.
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He's been sleeping on the living room couch on and off for the past two months, but happened to be at another friend’s house to watch football Thursday night.
"It would have landed right on my head, all the two-by-fours, two-by-eights, sheetrock, everything would have been on top of me," Lyness said. "I don’t think I would have survived."
Despite all the damage, Kibbe says he feels blessed.
"The house is a house, that can be replaced, torn down, I don’t care," he said. "I can’t replace my best friend, I can’t replace my family, my family’s my everything."
The family is living in a camper for now. NBC10 Boston is told that the Red Cross is helping the family out for now.
The debris left quite a set of chores for the Kibbe family.
As Elaina put it, "Well, it’s a mess in the house, it’s a lots of mess in the house."
