4-year-old boy seriously injured by falling tree in West Seattle; dad also hurt



SEATTLE --  Dangerous winds toppled trees all across Puget Sound, including a tree in West Seattle that fell and seriously injured a 4-year-old boy and also hurt his father.

The Seattle Fire Department says the boy and his father were inside Glen Garden, a popular trail in West Seattle when a massive tree broke off from its stump. A branch or some other part of the tree injured the child. The father suffered minor injuries. Both were taken to Harborview Medical Center.

It is a dangerous reminder that the wind can be dangerous and potentially deadly. Mayor Ed Murray on Thursday asked the public to stay away from city parks during the storm.

After the first round of storms, Q13 News saw numerous trees on transformers and roads. At one point, 20,000 City Light customers lost power.

“I will just hunker down,” Karissa Palmisano said.

Palmisano is one of thousands in lower Queen Anne who had to work in the dark. Workers at Nielsen’s Pastry baked by candlelight until City Light restored their power.

“We have a lot of areas with a lot of trees,” Seattle City Light spokesman Scott Thomson said.

If Friday’s winds were bad, Saturday night's are expected to be even stronger.

“The worst storm we saw was the Hannukah Eve storm of 2006, that had 190,000 customers without power. It was half of our service territory,” Thomson said.

Back then, it took nine days for many families to get power, a warning for customers as we brace for the big one.

“People’s homes and businesses will be the last thing to get fixed,” Thomson said.

City Light says in the case of a massive outage, they will take care of emergency situations first and restore power to places like hospitals before they can get down to your house and business. That’s why Jonah Brown is ready

“Rechargeable lights, rechargeable batteries, we got all that ready to go,” Brown said.

Brown, a construction worker, is also worried about the roads because he’s still scheduled to work on Saturday.

“That’s going to be miserable, especially that commute,” Brown said.