DRACUT, Mass. — You might say explosions are Luis Feliciano’s thing. But the retired transit police officer and bomb expert wasn’t anticipating a boom in his own front yard.
As snow continued to fall Sunday, Feliciano ventured into his front yard to assess the shoveling he was in for.
“I was making a path to go from here, straight back,” Feliciano told Boston 25 News. “I was going to work my way back to finishing here.”
Those best-laid plans soon came to a halt when Feliciano’s attention was drawn above, to the twin pine trees at the edge of his front yard.
“I heard like a big cracking sound and when I looked up I saw branches coming down,” he said. “I just took off running for my life.”
That moment was caught clearly on Feliciano’s Ring camera. His wife, horrified, also saw his narrow escape.
“She was just in shock, in the window,” he said. “And she said.. that’s it. You’re done. Come inside.”
About half a dozen pine boughs fell — some with trunks about eight inches in diameter. Any one of them could have injured Feliciano or even killed him.
It turns out that Feliciano’s neighbor, Ann Purcell, had a similar experience last year. She stepped out of her house and suddenly a tree limb fell in front of her.
“You don’t get any warning,” she said. “Unless you happen to be looking up. That was a real eye-opener... because you don’t hear them or anything, it’s just boom all of a sudden they’re down.”
Purcell and a neighbor shared the cost of taking down the tree — a job that typically costs in the thousands of dollars.
Feliciano was still working on his driveway one day after the storm, the limbs that could have killed him pushed to the side by the town.
He says it wasn’t just luck he wasn’t hit.
“I always tell my grandchildren pay attention to your surroundings,” he said. “Makes you count your blessings. Because you never know what can happen.”
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