Jim Marsico picked an opportune time to be out of town.

On Sunday night, stiff winds toppled one of his towering ash trees, sending it crashing into the spot where he normally parks his truck.

The tree was long enough to block a section of Bernard Street (near its intersection with Park Street) until City of Powell streets crews sawed and chipped it apart mid-morning Monday.

While the fallen ash created a temporary headache for drivers and passersby, Marsico was glad the northwesterly winds pushed the tree eastward.

“Thank the Lord it went into the street,” Marsico said, as a fall in the other direction could have dealt serious damage to his house.

A taxidermist and sculptor, Marsico was attending a sculpture festival in Loveland, Colorado, at the time the tree collapsed. Sometime late Sunday, he got a notification from his home security system that there’d been a loud noise outside. However, it wasn’t until Monday, when the city and neighbors called, that he found out what had caused the commotion.

Sunday was relatively calm for the most part, but stiff gusts of wind abruptly arrived before sunset. Between 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m., the average wind speed shot up from 3 to 26 mph, according to National Weather Service data, with gusts reaching 46 mph. The breezy conditions continued until Monday’s early morning hours.

Marsico’s ash had a long life. It was a tall tree when Marsico and his wife moved in some 47 years ago, he said, and it was just trimmed last year.

“I guess it is what it is,” Marsico said of the tree’s demise, but if it was going to fall, “I couldn’t have placed it better.”