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Giggling and Laughing, Then a Rain of Debris
Workers clean up Ayrlawn Park in Bethesda after an accident in which a big tree limb fell on a ride and a picnic table, injuring a woman and her niece.
(By Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
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A man had pulled the girl out of the branches. He was wiping the blood from her head with a towel. Somehow, Heller pulled herself over.
"I just saw that she was groaning a little, and I kept talking to her because I wanted to keep her awake. But she seemed in and out of it," Heller said. "She was crying a little bit."
Her nephew was "scratched up but looked okay," she said. He "was asking why the tree fell. He just kept asking it over and over. I gave him my watch to look at so he'd think of something else, but that didn't work very well."
The six or seven families at the park sprang into action. They called for help and brought ice packs. Someone gave Heller a towel to wipe the blood from her eyes.
"They were all screaming, 'The tree fell!' " she said. "It seemed like a little community coming together, in a way."
Paramedics and park police arrived quickly. Park managers, tree crews and the county parks director went to the park to inspect the scene. The playground will remain closed until the area is inspected, which would take at least three days, Holsendolph said.
The county's senior urban arborist was examining the limb yesterday afternoon, looking for cracks, holes, fungi or other defects in the wood. Initial inspections did not find any structural problems with the tree. Officials might bring in an independent expert to examine the branch.
"It appears this was a live limb that just fell," Holsendolph wrote in an e-mail.
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