susanne
dB
Boy oh boy, did I receive a wake-up call Tuesday morning!
I've been spending a day or two each week "mom-sitting," helping my mother recover from a broken shoulder and giving my sister a break from eldercare. Tuesday morning, the phone rang at around 8am...it was Keith telling me that a fir tree had fallen on our house.
He had gotten up at 4am to feed the animals before work. When he took the horses' buckets and hay to them, he saw in the flashlight beam that their run-in shelter had been knocked apart in the wind (which hadn't seemed all that strong). He walked the fenceline and saw that our vegetable bed (now dormant) was buried beneath an alder tree that missed the fence by a foot.
He turned back toward the house and nearly fainted. In the sketchy light of the flashlight, he could see a 50 foot (more or less) Douglas Fir tree that had fallen across the lawn with the top 10 feet or so lying on the roof. Panicked, he ran to get a closer look. The roof had no damage other than a very bent rain gutter.
Later, by daylight, he saw that it was not one tree, but TWO. The second one was even bigger a had taken out the other tree on its way down. It appeared that the branches (and probably the smaller tree) had broken the fall and were still taking a great deal of the weight. Somehow, when when these trees fell they narrowly missed our beautiful Japanese lantern, my beloved, crusty old birdbath, assorted garden art and the antenna on the roof.
Keith slept through it all.
I didn't get home until after dark, so I could see little until this morning -- quite a stunning sight. All I can say is we are unbelievably LUCKY.
This is really terrifying when you consider our "tin cabin" -- an ncient mobile home with a lodgepole pine overhead roof. I'm amazed at just how strong this structure is. I had to laugh at how much we had worried about the snowload a couple of winters back!
We live in an area with extreme terrain -- high hills jut up directly from the valley floor, and steep, deep ravines create quite a jagged topography. We are on the east side of a ridge at about 700 ft bove the Columbia River and sea level. Strangely, this terrain has sheltered us from almost all thunderstorms and wind storms, but the rare ones that find us are quite severe.
So now I'm making phone calls, looking for someone to remove these monsters, and thanking our lucky stars that nobody was hurt. The horses will need to turn to the fir trees next to the corral for shelter until we can rebuild their run-in, but everyone is safe and sound. It's just the humans that are a bit rattled!
I've been spending a day or two each week "mom-sitting," helping my mother recover from a broken shoulder and giving my sister a break from eldercare. Tuesday morning, the phone rang at around 8am...it was Keith telling me that a fir tree had fallen on our house.
He had gotten up at 4am to feed the animals before work. When he took the horses' buckets and hay to them, he saw in the flashlight beam that their run-in shelter had been knocked apart in the wind (which hadn't seemed all that strong). He walked the fenceline and saw that our vegetable bed (now dormant) was buried beneath an alder tree that missed the fence by a foot.
He turned back toward the house and nearly fainted. In the sketchy light of the flashlight, he could see a 50 foot (more or less) Douglas Fir tree that had fallen across the lawn with the top 10 feet or so lying on the roof. Panicked, he ran to get a closer look. The roof had no damage other than a very bent rain gutter.
Later, by daylight, he saw that it was not one tree, but TWO. The second one was even bigger a had taken out the other tree on its way down. It appeared that the branches (and probably the smaller tree) had broken the fall and were still taking a great deal of the weight. Somehow, when when these trees fell they narrowly missed our beautiful Japanese lantern, my beloved, crusty old birdbath, assorted garden art and the antenna on the roof.
Keith slept through it all.
I didn't get home until after dark, so I could see little until this morning -- quite a stunning sight. All I can say is we are unbelievably LUCKY.
This is really terrifying when you consider our "tin cabin" -- an ncient mobile home with a lodgepole pine overhead roof. I'm amazed at just how strong this structure is. I had to laugh at how much we had worried about the snowload a couple of winters back!
We live in an area with extreme terrain -- high hills jut up directly from the valley floor, and steep, deep ravines create quite a jagged topography. We are on the east side of a ridge at about 700 ft bove the Columbia River and sea level. Strangely, this terrain has sheltered us from almost all thunderstorms and wind storms, but the rare ones that find us are quite severe.
So now I'm making phone calls, looking for someone to remove these monsters, and thanking our lucky stars that nobody was hurt. The horses will need to turn to the fir trees next to the corral for shelter until we can rebuild their run-in, but everyone is safe and sound. It's just the humans that are a bit rattled!
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