Not my houses. 48” DBH. There was a lady asleep in the bed of the second picture. Not a scratch on her.
Yeah, that's common with oaks around here. I call it stump rot as it starts at the base. Sometimes they crack and you have a warning, sometimes they are full of carpenter ants taking advantage of the now soft rotting heartwood and that is a warning. As much as the shade is nice, I have any near the house with signs of not being healthy cut down for just this reason, exacerbated by living in a hurricane zone near the water too. Some would argue let it fall down and the insurance will cover the damage but far too often the insurance doesn't cover all the expenses. All the big trees close to around my house are now gone. I miss them and wish they weren't but the stately old trees just weren't structurally healthy any more. I've replaced some with trees that don't get quite so tall and won't shade the solar panels on the roof.
We had a call of a lightening strike hitting a transformer two blocks away. As we pulled out of the station, I said if there had been a lightening strike that close (6 blocks from the station), we would have heard it. That call ended up being limbs on the power lines arcing. A few minutes later when we were belled out to the tree on a house. When we saw it I said thats what they heard, thought it was a strike then their power went out.
Hollowing is common here too when the oaks get 24" DBH and bigger. This side of Ft. Smith, AR was founded 201 years ago. There are lots of Big, Old shade trees here. This isn't the first one we've ran on a house. We had a 22" limb off a tree take the 2nd story corner off a house recently, and the porch. That corner was also a bedroom with people asleep in it. No injuries on that one either. Old houses are tough.
