A fierce windstorm whipped through Langley and Metro Vancouver Saturday afternoon, leaving downed power lines and trees ripped from their roots in its wake.
The storm left more than 200,000 people without power in the Lower Mainland, and transformed lit intersections into four-way stops.
(Read more below)
Wind left a Brookswood family in the dark, and minus one beloved flowering Japanese plum tree that was pulled out of the ground and left lying on its side, blocking much of the street.
Maureen DeReus heard "a whole bunch of cracks” and worried a group of cedar trees bunched together in her backyard might topple onto her house.
Not long after that, she heard someone banging on her door. A neighbour told her, “Come out and see your tree!”
The plum tree that had sat in her front yard for the past three decades is no more.
“It used to go into masses of pink blossoms,” she said.
It was her grandson Elijah’s favourite climbing tree. He would climb the tree and “grab plums and stuff his face,” DeReus said.