This sort of incident was actually a infrequent, but still fairly common, occurrence in Panama. At the Jungle Operations Training Center there were quite a few casualties over the years where trees, or just limbs, fell on soldiers. We lost three in one incident in the late 1980s. The trouble there was that the soil was not very deep, and there was a bedrock of hard ancient coral under it. When the soil was saturated the large trees just lost their hold. There were also many insect species that weakened large limbs, causing them to fall. It was not such a freak accident there, unfortunately.