James Ruhl was in his Kirkwood home, drying off after a bath when he said he heard a loud boom, that he thought was the beginning of thunder rolling through the area. But it packed a punch. Ruhl said it “jarred me through my skeleton.”

In a matter of minutes, the storm felled numerous trees in the Kirkwood area on Woodlawn Avenue, including one in Ruhl’s yard that he estimates to be at least 40-50 years old. Neighboring trees hit power lines, and poles in the neighborhood.

In nearby Warson Woods, an army of tree trimmers made room for trucks from Black & McDonald, a Kansas City electrical contractor, who had descended on the area of Andrew Drive and Renderer Drive, where power poles will have to be rebuilt due to fallen trees that also took out cars and fences.

The work to clean up a lot of the damage was well underway by late Friday morning, but tree trimmers say to be watching out for “hangers”, trees that didn’t fall, but still have damage, in the weeks to come.

“As trees are starting to leaf out we want to be making sure that we're able to see that all our trees are leafing out, that all their tree parts are leafing out. If you have large dead sections of a tree, well those are at risk for getting broken out of a tree, resulting in some of the stuff that we see here today,” Robert Thomasson of Ryan Lawn & Tree said on scene in Warson Woods.