There is another flower pot with mini yellow roses under the tree a few feet away from the flower pot that's pictured.
The wind was blowing south. The tree is pointed at my neighbor's driveway just to the south of us. It's not blocking their driveway, so that's one good thing. They can still get out.
This flag was right in front of the tree. It's a little one you can get at a grocery store for about $2. It's fabric. The tree blew down, but that little flag stayed there, got ripped up a bit tho.
The wind just blasted the tree down. I think the wind twisted the tree. Because the side that's facing up, used to face the house. One of the reasons that it makes me think that we might have had a small tornado mixed in with the straight line winds.
The roots are still underground, and we're going to have to rip out our landscaping to get down to the root bed to get the roots out before we can replace the tree. (hope we can replace it)
My dad just called me to inform me that the power came back on. It flickered right after that, but it was still on when he called me, so YAY for OPPD! (OPPD = Omaha Public Power District)
4 comments:
Oh! I'm so sorry about your shade tree!
But it's good it didn't hit anything on it's way down.
I live on the Gulf Coast of AL and we had two pine trees near our house removed last year in case a hurricane brought them down. It was sad to see them go, but a lot less grief than if they had fallen on something important.
Well, the tree did hit the landscaping light as it went down, and I had two planters with mini roses in them. One was tipped over...I'm not sure if the other planter (and plant) survived. Hope the planter lived. I can always buy a new mini rose bush.
I'm gonna miss that tree!
Damn, I'm glad it didn't go down on the house! No house means no posts. ;_;
I found your blog by looking for crochet tips, but severe weather phenomena are my favorite science topic. I hope you'll let me babble for a minute... ^_^
If radar scrutiny didn't suggest a tornado, I'm betting that you got attacked by one hell of a microburst. The fact that your poor tree broke right at the base like that is usually an indication of such an event -- a microburst comes from above, so it catches the top of the tree like a sail and directs the force downward, adding to the strain that gravity already puts on the tree. The lowest section of the trunk bears the most force, and if its structure crushes, the whole tree goes. Any remaining structural veins in the wood will result in the tree twisting 180 degrees (or more). A tornado strong enough to down a healthy tree right at the base would also have dragged the tree away from its stump by a noticeable distance, say 10+ feet (usually more like 30+).
The awesome part (and again, sorry for all the text) about the image you have here is that it shows a near-perfect, conical crush pattern. The trunk isn't shredded as it would have been by tornadic wind. Also, the break is EXACTLY at ground level (from what I can see in your photo), where the tree would otherwise be the strongest, which is unique to a powerful microburst event. Specifically, to the very center of it. So, unless there was some other source of damage to that area of the tree, like fungus or bugs, that could affect it's common stability... I'll bet you were within an eight of a mile from the absolute core of that sheer.
Extremely rare position to be in, and extremely cool. (It really is a shame about the tree, but any storm chaser on the Plains would probably have given an arm and a leg to experience that burst from your coordinates!)
Cheers to you; thanks for sharing your pictures and your story!
The storm did it's worst damage just to the south of me. Which is, give or take a little distance, just a little over a half mile.
The intersection that it hit was closed for most of the week. All the power poles were down. It hit a gas station and blew part of the roof off. The sign for the Target store is still leaning towards the south (the storm came in from the northwest and went southeast)
The Target had it's air conditioner ripped partially off the roof, and all the remodeling they were doing to the front facing of the store was ripped away.
I think we had about a 10 or 15 minute warning that there was a storm coming. They knew it was going to have strong winds, so they sounded the sirens about 30 seconds before it hit my neighborhood.
One second things were calm, and the next second lawn furniture was flying thru the air.
My aunt lives across the street, and the run-off pond is behind her house and a bunch of other houses. She had just gotten home, and was about to try to go out the backdoor to get her lawn furniture cushions. The storm hit just as she was opening the blinds. She told me that the pond tsunami-ed towards her house. She took one look and ran for the basement (probably not the best place when there is a wind driven tsunami headed for your backyard)
Everyone in my neighborhood (and other large parts of Omaha) have to get new roofs. The hail was mostly small marble size, but there was enough of the hen egg sized hail hitting the roofs that most of the roofs have been totaled. The insurance guy said he lost count of hail strikes after he hit 30 hail strikes per 10 square foot. We're lucky that our window in the front of the house didnt get smashed like a lot of the neighbors had. We're still getting a new window there because of the hail damage to the aluminium around the outside of the window.
I wish I had gotten pictures of what the parking lot of the local park looked like after everyone started to dump their tree debris (illegally) in it. Area about the size of a small baseball field was covered to about 15-20 feet deep in some areas. (they called in a front loader to move stuff around when people wouldnt stop dumping. They were too lazy to drive the extra couple of miles to the official dump site at the soccer fields)
Oh, it was confirmed that it was straight line winds, in excess of 120mph (I think) in most areas. I dont know if you scrolled down on my blog to an earlier post where I put some video of the storm that I got from the back door of my house. (back door is in the basement) It was scary!
Oh, and nothing was wrong with our Ash tree, other than the fact that it got blasted in the wind.
All the rose bushes and other plant life around it that got smashed to pieces just started to come back about a week ago. All my Henry Fonda (yellow) roses are finally blooming! One bush had over 25 blooms on it today. The others, planted just this year, have about 5 or 6 blooms on them now. The other flowering plantlife that were at least a foot and a half tall when they were smashed are about 7 or 8 inches high now, but still not flowering yet.
We replanted a tree near the spot the Ash was in, a River Birch tree. Wish we still had the shade tree...it was 105+ heat index today and the new tree just doesnt give any shade. You could probably bake cookies on our porch.
Post a Comment