A More Than 100-Year-Old Pine Crashed Into Katherine Loflin’s Cary Home in a Storm, and Her Dog and Cat Survived, With Repairs Estimated at $50,000 or More

Owen the cat was walking down the stairs of Katherine Loflin’s home in Cary, North Carolina, moments before a pine estimated at more than 100 years old came down through the roof. Loflin saw the cat on the steps just before the crash, and she came away with only minor scratches while Owen and her dog, Remy, both survived, WRAL reported. The repair estimate for the house now runs from $50,000 to $100,000.

A Loud Crack Loflin First Took for Lightning

The pine fell during storm weather tied to the remnants of Hurricane Isaias, which pushed damaging wind across the Triangle after the hurricane came ashore in the Florida Panhandle. Loflin told WRAL reporter Bailey Stamos that strong winds had just passed through her backyard when she heard a loud crack.

Her first thought was lightning. Then, as she described it, “everything just started falling.”

The old pine did not glance off the house or land in the yard. It went through the roof and came to rest in a part of the home where Loflin often spends time with her pets, according to the station’s account. That detail is what made the minutes afterward so frightening for her: the tree landed in the same part of the house that she and the animals share most.

Loflin’s story is one of several from the same storm system in which a single mature tree, rather than the wind itself, did the worst of the damage to a family’s home.

Remy and Owen, Both Found Safe

Loflin told WRAL that in the first moments after the crash she was sure Owen had been lost, because she had just seen him on the stairs. He had not been. Both the cat and Remy, the dog, came through without serious harm.

A follow-up account from Hoodline’s Raleigh-Durham desk said Loflin made clear that the safety of her pets mattered most to her once the dust settled. Her own injuries were limited to minor scratches.

Stories like this one tend to turn on small timing details. A few seconds earlier or later on the stairs, and the account of that day in Cary might have read very differently. Loflin’s recollection of seeing Owen on the steps “moments before” the pine fell is the detail she returned to in both reports.

A $50,000-to-$100,000 Repair Bill, and a House That Held

Repairs to the home are estimated at $50,000 to $100,000, according to WRAL. That range covers a roof that a century-old trunk passed through and the interior where it landed.

Loflin credited the way the house was built with helping protect her when the pine came down. She also said the home would not feel like home again if she had to look at the damage every day, Hoodline reported, a reminder that the cost of a tree strike is not only the contractor’s bill.

For North Carolina homeowners sorting out storm claims, the North Carolina Department of Insurance points residents to its consumer help line at 855-408-1212 and notes that standard homeowners policies do not cover flood damage, which is handled through separate flood insurance. Wind and falling-tree claims, and any disagreement with an insurer over them, can be raised with the department through that same line.

Readers following the season’s storm damage may also remember the falling trees that crushed homes in Birmingham and Escambia County when Isaias first made landfall near Destin. The Cary pine came later in the same storm’s path, after the system had weakened and moved inland.

Isaias Remnants Sent Tornado Warnings Across Central North Carolina

The storm that toppled Loflin’s pine was part of a wider outbreak. Hoodline, citing WRAL, reported damaging winds and tornadoes in parts of Wake County, and it cited ABC11 for reports of strong storms and possible tornadoes that downed trees and damaged homes, buildings and power lines across central North Carolina and the Fayetteville area.

Citing The News & Observer, the same account said 15 tornado warnings were issued across central North Carolina, a forecast region covering 31 counties. Warnings for Wake, Durham and 17 other counties had expired by mid-afternoon. About 3,000 customers statewide were without power by 3 p.m., most of them in Cumberland County.

Forecasters had flagged that risk. The final public advisory on Post-Tropical Cyclone Isaias said a couple of tornadoes were possible across the Piedmont and Coastal Plain of Virginia and North Carolina, as the weakening system moved east-northeast with maximum sustained winds near 25 mph.

The National Weather Service planned to survey the damage in the days afterward to confirm whether and where tornadoes touched down, and the state emergency response team remained activated, according to the ABC11 reporting Hoodline cited. Dry weather was expected to follow for most of the next week, giving crews and homeowners a window to clear limbs and cover damaged roofs.

Not the First Big Tree to Hit a Cary Home

Cary has seen this kind of damage before. In 2023, a massive tree fell on a home on Alicary Court, near U.S. Highway 1 and Southeast Cary Parkway, while two people were inside, according to earlier WRAL reporting that Hoodline referenced.

The storm also arrived at the end of a hard stretch for Triangle trees. The North Carolina State Climate Office reported that Raleigh got 2.17 inches of rain in September, 42% of normal, and that Severe Drought expanded across Wake County and surrounding areas. The office did not tie the dry spell to any one tree failure, and no report has said what caused Loflin’s pine to give way beyond the wind.

Questions about who is responsible for an aging tree before it fails come up again and again, as in the case of the decaying tree on Gimblin Street in St. Louis, where a neighbor and the city disagreed over who should have cut it.

For Loflin, the immediate questions are more practical: getting a roof back over the part of the house the pine went through, and settling the bill that comes with it. The two animals who were in the house that day, Remy and Owen, are the part of the story she has said matters most.

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This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.

Image: Dcrjsr, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons