A mother’s intuition gets daughter out of harm’s way

WASHINGTON — Kelly Hanrahan calls it a mother’s intuition. She also says “God was looking out for us.”

Whatever it was, it might have saved her 16-year-old daughter, Kathleen, from injury or worse during Tuesday’s strong thunderstorms.

Kathleen was sitting on her bed in the bedroom she shares with her younger sister Caroline in their house on Lorain Avenue, in Silver Spring, Maryland Tuesday evening, when the storm was gathering.

“I could tell it was gonna storm,” Kathleen says. “It was very windy.”

Kelly Hanrahan could tell too — and she had a feeling.

“I went to the kitchen, and I saw the dark clouds coming, and the wind picked up, and I called up to my daughter, ‘Come down. I don’t want you upstairs with this wind.'”

It was just in time.

“Within 10 seconds, 20 seconds at the most,” Kelly Hanrahan says, “I heard the big bang.” Kathleen describes an impact that felt “almost like an earthquake.”

The cause of all that was a tree coming through the roof of the house and crashing into the bedroom.

The room is wrecked, but everyone is OK. But it could have been bad. When they looked at the damage, Kelly Hanrahan says, “The tree was on her bed.”

WTOP’s Michelle Basch contributed to this report. Follow @WTOP on Twitter and WTOP on Facebook.