A couple of weeks ago we had a 4 a.m. wind storm that had it's way with our "Royal Oaks" neighborhood. I have heard that the wind speed reached 130 mph, but most reports said the equipment used to record the gusts broke after 100 mph. Because there were no signs of circulation in the storm, they say there were no tornadoes and are calling it a "downburst". Whatever it was, it was nasty. We live on a large horseshoe street with one other cross street, and I would say in our little neighborhood we had 100 trees or large parts of trees down. About a third of the houses here have a ravine in the back with older trees that had a lot of damage, but what was surprising was the number of 30 year old trees in yards that went down. I didn't think to take the camera out until the second time we walked the loop, so the pictures are about 60 hours after the storm. Chainsaws had been working non stop for about 40 of those hours, and a lot of trees had already been taken care of. Here a few things I was able to capture:
This house lost 3 of the 4 trees on their boulevard. This one was laying across the road when I tried to drive out at 9 am.
The owners had just finished cleaning this one up, but we had Myka stand next to the stump to show how big it was. It was perfectly healthy.
I should be able to see a house from here. This house had some of the worst damage. You can see the root system of the tree on the right compared to the blue car. There were 3 or 4 huge trees down in their front yard alone.
This house lost pretty much all of their shade as well. The National Weather Service was called about this tree, because where Kurt is looking is what's left of the stump, but the tree itself is 15 feet away from there. The owners said this tree is at least 75 feet tall. That is some serious wind to drag a tree that big that far.
And here is the base of the tree. You can see the path that was dug in the ground as it was drug to it's final resting spot.
I really wish we had taken pictures that first morning. It totally looked like a disaster area with limbs and leaves and entire trees everywhere. Luckily no one was injured and only a few houses had trees fall right on them and cause damage. We only lost 2 large trees in the ravine and half of two small trees out front. Our white house was plastered with green leaves and we have a dent in our fence where a large limb came down, but otherwise we were fine. And from the looks of things, we had the least amount of damage around here.
Kurt was a little disappointed as he loves using his chainsaw, but there was enough work in the neighborhood to keep him busy and be the helpful neighbor/pastor guy. He had a wedding Saturday afternoon, so after being up in trees all morning cutting down limbs, he quickly changed and headed off to church. Someone asked our neighbor where Kurt went and his response was "lumberjack by morning, Pastor by afternoon."
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