Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Hurricane Sandy

 We're all OK but Hurricane Sandy brought down seven trees in the back. Seven big trees.

The only damage in the front was a small limb (10 feet long?) that fell down and failed to harm anything on the way down or in landing.

It seems like the worst winds came up the creek valley, hit our hillside and did a lot of damage, but then didn't do much to the opposite hillside or the houses.

The first set of downed trees, four in total.  The first one to fall is in the very back (the roots aren't visible).  The first one was the lightning-struck tree: the tallest tree on the hillside. I knew this because it had been struck by lightning twice. It was starting to die a bit because of the lightning strikes, so I figured it was going to come down sometime and cause a lot of damage. Which it did. There are two trucks coming from the big uprooted roots, and in the immediate left foreground you can see the fourth tree to be knocked down.

Looking up along the lightning tree. The roots in front belong to the pair of downed trees. Dad and I heard these fall; it sounded like a lot of breaking, crashing branches. I would have thought the sound of four trees falling would be louder (admittedly, the wind and the rain were pretty loud too).

Trunks and branches. This was the path we used to get down to the brush piles and the rest of the woods. We might need to borrow a chainsaw ...
I think this is just a branch. There aren't any roots, it's just a random chunk of tree that fell from somewhere.

I only found one root structure so I think this was all one tree. (That's our neighbor's yard that it fell in.)

The tree that fell in the neighbor's yard. In the distance you can see the sixth fallen tree.
The sixth fallen tree.  It was obviously a bit rotten and hollow inside.

The hollow tree claimed a victim on its way down: the seventh fallen tree I counted on our hillside of the woods.
Looking past the hollow tree to Bill's tree.


The empty hole in the sky where the lightning tree used to be.