Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Windstorm
Sunday night we had a massive windstorm . 80 mph winds. Over three hundred fifty thousand homes without power in the whole state . We lost it at six am when a big willow down the street shorted out the main lines . Just happened to open the blinds in time to witness the fireworks .
Ran the generator on and off for several hours during the day to keep the fridges and furnace going . By eight pm CMP had got us back on line and I was able to shut off the generator .
Had a big limb off my back neighbor's tree take down a section of my fence .
Nothing major .
I limbed it out all in about 20 minutes with a small pruning handsaw . I stepped aside and let my crack junkie neighbor clean up the rest with her chainsaw .
Today I ran up to my parents in Freeport and there were trees down everywhere requiring some detours . This is one on their road I had to drive under to get to them . Someone had cleared the branches enough for us to get under .
Good thing I installed a nice auto start 11k watt Generack for them last year.
A massive hundred foot white pine almost took out the back corner of their house. Just kissed the back deck. Ten degrees to the right and it would have been much more consequential.
Couple of hundred twenty footers came down in the front yard just barely missing dad's tool shed. The base of that one is about thirty inches across .
Couple more tall pines came down behind the vegetable garden .
This one is the Siamese one to the one that is hung up .
Spent the afternoon cutting up just one of the ones in the front yard..
About thirty inches across
Thirty six feet of straight knot free lumber there . I'll be milling some nice clear planks out of that one .
The next section , from the leftmost saw cut , is about sixteen feet , and the one just beyond that is another fourteen feet .
A spectacular mess .
Had to replace some shingles that blew off the ridge cap on the roof , so I got some shots from up there . This one is the big pine that landed on the back corner of the deck .
The big one in the front yard after some clean up .
The big log is thirty inches in diameter and thirty six feet long .
I bucked out the other one in the front yard too and the stump sprang most of the way back in place . Usually the first thing to tip over in any kind of wind is dad's smoker, the green box on top of the barrel. This time it did not even wiggle .
Ooopsss!! Tuvieron mucha suerte. Parece que fue la primera vez que hubo una tormenta de viento tan fuerte, no?
ReplyDeleteDecember 2008 we had something similar but it was ice that took the trees and power lines down. Over all we were lucky.
DeleteI'm glad you're putting the trees to good use. I see an awful lot of nice lumber cut into firewood by folks who have absolutely no idea what they're wasting. Of course, I'm biased since I was raised in a sawmill family.
ReplyDeleteI have at least five long straight forty foot sections like that one to mill up. should be fun. I want to make some four inch thick slabs to make counter and table tops out of. The rest is mostly junk. It's all soft pine so we don't even burn it as it soots up the chimney badly. So I'll likely just chip it up. Only one of the trees was hardwood. Soil is very thin here. One or two feet at most, granite ledge under that. So all but one of the trees were uprooted.
DeleteThat same storm came through here this past weekend. We had some trees like those in your picture come down, just finished clearing up the Jeep trail so we can get down the mountain. I heard on the news how bad it was up there and wondered how you made out. Figured you'd be ok come what may.
ReplyDeleteYea we'll get through it OK. Lots of work to do though. At least I can get some nice wide planking out of those logs.
DeleteAlways some good in just about everything, I guess. We've had way more of these storms this year than I can remember ever happening before. I sure hope we don't have ice storms and snow storms in greater profusion and magnitude than usual this winter.
DeleteLast big one we had around here was the ice storm of 2008. We were without power for four days. And that was late December. So a lot more inconvenient for folks as if you did not have a generator you did not have heat. I had an older Craftsman 3500 watt generator that rattled the fillings out if your teeth, but could not shut it down as there was ground water flowing in the basement sump at the rate of about twenty five gallons every 5 minutes. Ran the thing for four days straight. Even ran a cord across the street an powered my neighbor's furnace. After that I made up my mind and spent the money on a new quieter Generac. Sure glad we had it this time. Just gave the old one away to my friend Ben up in Richmond. If I'd kept it I could likely have sold it for six hundred bucks during this last outage. There are still sixty thousand without power up the coast. Parents power just came back last night after being out for four days.
DeleteGlad you and yours are Okay. Looks like a near thing at your folks.
ReplyDeleteYea, sure glad there was no damage to the house over there. The tree that came down near the deck was on the corner of the master bedroom. So it could have been ugly especially with dad now bedridden on the short final. The standby generator is worth its weight in gold for me so I don't have to worry about them in that regard. Their street is still without power going on seventy two hours. I do have a ton of chainsaw work on my hands though.
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