Four Dundee primary school pupils escaped serious injury by inches as gale-force winds brought a large tree crashing down from above them.
Rhianne Grieve (12) had been walking up Dens Road with her three friends at around 6pm on Sunday when a thick tree snapped near the junction of Main Street.
As the top half plummeted, it completely flattened a steel lamppost and just missed the young girls, who had run for cover.
Rhianne said the incident had left the group “petrified.”
She said, “I was just shaking. It was so frightening. If we hadn’t run then the tree would have hit us.
“I was walking down with my friends and we just heard a really loud crack and the saw the tree falling.
“I started running away back down the road and then the tree hit the lamppost and it came down too.”
She added, “It smashed on the ground and the tree and the lamppost both just missed us.”
Left badly shaken by the near miss, the primary seven pupil from Lorimer Street immediately called her father Robert to tell him about her lucky escape.
She said, “My dad told me to calm down because I was talking too quickly and he couldn’t understand what I was saying.
“He sounded really worried and he asked me if I was okay. I told him what happened and he told me to stay away from the rest of the trees, in case any more fell down.”
Tayside Police cordoned the road off from Main Street as far down as Arklay Street, with traffic diverted away from the area.
A spokesman said, “We received a call at around 6pm to say that a tree had taken out a lamppost on Dens Road.
“Traffic and buses were diverted up Arklay Street and a section of the road was cordoned off. Nobody was injured during the incident.”
Remarkably, the tree came down in the middle of the road, the only place it could possibly have missed the five parked cars on either side of the street.
Dundee City Council was contacted and workers from the parks department were sent out to chop the trunk and branches into smaller pieces for removal.