Jesse Labbe-Watson poses with his neighbor's car that was crushed Saturday morning by a fallen tree. The tree came down due to winds from storm Lee. Credit: Jules Walkup / BDN

Storm Lee caused a massive tree to come crashing down on a car on West Meadow Road in Rockland Saturday morning.

The nearly 60 mph wind gusts combined with saturated soil caused the large black locust tree to fall on a power line, then the Toyota Prius.

Jesse Labbe-Watson, a neighbor of the car’s owner, said the power went out around 8 a.m. Saturday, and shortly after, he heard the large cracking sound of a tree’s roots giving way.

“All of a sudden, we hear this like crack, crackling and smash and like boom and feeling the shockwave,” Labbe-Watson said. “And we come out and poked our heads out, and it’s like, ‘Oh, bummer.’”

Labbe-Watson said the power line the tree fell on was originally holding most of its weight, but after the power company came and cut the line, the tree slowly sank more and more onto the car.

“It’s continued to settle. So if it weren’t totaled first thing in the day, it’s totaled now,” Labbe-Watson said.

Nobody was hurt in the incident, and the owner couldn’t be reached for comment.

Jules Walkup reports on the midcoast and is a Report for America corps member. They graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in journalism and moved to Maine from Tampa, Florida in July 2023.