Rotten Oak Tree Splits, Falls Onto Parked Vehicles in Brandon (PHOTOS)

Wayne Asbell of St. Petersburg had the day off, but he hadn’t expected to spend the day in Brandon, watching workers set about the task of freeing his family car from the rotting oak tree smashed into the BMW’s white, SUV roof.

His wife, a labor and delivery nurse at Brandon Regional Hospital, had parked her car under the shade in the parking lot at the Oakfield Medical Plaza, across the street from the hospital on Oakfield Drive.

“Someone came to her and said, ‘You need to come with me and walk down to human resources, and her first thought was, ‘I’m going to be fired!’ ” Asbell said. “No, they told her, ‘You’re BMW got crushed by a tree in the parking lot.' And she said, ‘Oh, is that it?’ ”

Bad news in today's bleak economic times is relative. And so, too, the good news. In this case, as Asbell sees it, a crushed roof in a quiet parking lot on a bright, sunny day, under scorching heat, is something you just take in stride.

As he put it: "It’s something that could have happened to anybody, in any parking lot."

In this case, it happened to two other cars as well, parked alongside the Asbell vehicle. One of the other owners -- whose car had a smashed in rear-view window -- did not want to be interviewed, and the third owner was not on the scene when Brandon Patch arrived to shoot a picture of the fallen tree.

Before the accident, the Asbell vehilce “looked good, but it was a rough ride,”Asbell said, adding that he preferred a Mustang.

“My wife liked [the BMW] more than I did,” he said, good-naturedly. "I wanted to get rid of it, but I didn’t want to do it like this. I wanted to trade it in.”

According to Patty Montgomery, a spokesperson for the hospital, the hospital leases space in the plaza for various educational programs and some hospital departments.

Doctors, too, have offices in the plaza.

“The tree fell,” she said. “Not even the whole tree. It’s a top-heavy tree, and it broke, where the trunk comes up and splits into two very large trunks.”

Asbell gave a similar assessment.

“It was an odd day for it to blow over,” he added. “It’s a beautiful day.”

Montgomery said it looked like a tree would look after a lightning strike, but without the black marks.

“It was hollow, it was split,” Asbell said about the tree. “It was just its time.”