Australian beginner Harrison Crowe and his entourage have relived the terrifying second a falling tree despatched spectators scurrying for his or her lives throughout the second one spherical of the Masters.
Crowe used to be taking part in the close by sixteenth hollow with fellow countryman Min Woo Lee when the towering Georgia pine crashed around the seventeenth tee field and despatched two extra cascading at Augusta National on Friday.
Crowe’s folks Tony and Shaunaugh had been a number of the spectators who escaped amid the dramatic scenes as flash lightning led to havoc and the suspension of play.
“They were on the other side so that was lucky,” Crowe advised AAP. “I was on the 16th green (about 30 meters away). We heard it. We watched the whole thing. It just started crackling and then it came down. It was scary.
The frightening incident left Shaunaugh Crowe shaken.
“My heart was up in my throat,” she told AAP. “First you heard this almighty crack. I looked over and saw this big tree toppling, then you see it falling on to another tree, then another and my first comment was, ‘F**k’.
“Because people were sitting there and I didn’t know where everyone else was – and Tony and the boys were 10 meters away from where it happened.
“So they didn’t actually see it – they heard it. Everyone is just screaming, because it’s just like, ‘This hasn’t happened’. Everything just stopped.
Crowe’s coach and caddie John Serhan said it was a miracle no one was killed.
“Tony was 20 meters from it. I s**t myself. You could feel it down there. This little tornado whipped up. It didn’t last long but it caught those trees,” he said. “You could see them start to sway. They were lucky no one got killed. Very, very lucky.
Crowe’s father said he watched the tree fall “in slow motion”.
“The worst part about it was all the security guards after the fact said you need to get off the course because more trees are going to fall down,” he said.
Serhan’s son Joseph said the frightening ordeal started when Crowe’s group was approaching the 16th green.
“We got this huge gust up in our faces of sand and dirt,” he said. “We thought ‘here we go’. As soon as we got out into the open, it was blowing harder and we could literally hear this crack.
“We all put our hands on our heads and heard a bunch of people screaming. There was about 50 people sitting down and it was literally falling where people were sitting in their chairs.
“People were falling out of their chairs on the ground and crawling to get away. From where we were, we thought for sure they were going to get hit. You had zero chance.
“There was a lady who froze completely. The trees fell perfectly between her – there was about a meter gap either side of her.”
Crowe’s mother commended Masters officials for their swift response.
“You just saw green coats. Everyone turned up within two seconds,” she mentioned. “Then the safety guard referred to as out and mentioned ‘nobody has been harm’ as a result of, to look that, we had been pondering any person has simply been killed up there.
“No comic story, I checked out Harrison and he used to be status at the inexperienced and he put his give up his mouth as though to mention, ‘Oh no’.
“I had to rise up to only ask Harrison is he OK. By the time I were given as much as the clubhouse, I used to be in tears. I stopped up having my bronchial asthma spray as a result of, like significantly, I could not cope.”