BELMONT, N.C. — The storms sweeping across the Carolinas Thursday have brought numerous trees down, and a beloved flower shop in Belmont was one of the victims.
Channel 9’s Ken Lemon spotted crews trying to clean up at Jean’s Flowers on Park Street. There’s a tarp on the roof, but the owners of the flower shop say the hard part still remains: removing the tree that caused the damage.
You can barely see Jean’s Flowers from the sidewalk. Owner Tammy Poteat watched as crews lifted the chimney from the sunken roof. She said a tree fell on the shop sometime before she and her employees got to work.
“I thought, ‘Thank you, God, no one was in the place,’” Poteat said.
The tree smashed the roof and also buckled the walls. Crews made that discovery while cutting through the huge tree limbs on the front steps. They had to use ropes to keep the tree from causing more damage.
Poteat has owned the business since 1991.
“It means we are going to be closed for a while. I said two weeks, I think, maybe two months,” Poteat said.
The guys doing the work told Channel 9 that Poteat is not the only one facing this problem.
“We thought it was going to be a slow day, then the next thing we know, people [are] calling left and right for tree work, trees on houses,” said Jason Dugan with Justin Dugan’s Tree Service.
He says a long drought has stressed trees, and some of them weren’t ready for the sudden downpour. The flower shop scene was their worst case Thursday, but the timing worked in the employees’ favor.
“They could have got killed for sure. It’s caved in; there’s boards and shingles and everything just laying in there,” Dugan said.
Poteat says she’s taking it in stride. She’s just happy no one was hurt. She says she needed serious repairs on the roof of her home, and that took a year to fix -- she’s praying for a speedy repair, this time.
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