stupid storms *grr*
So I was happily vidding yesterday (SCC, Shirley Manson's Samson & Delilah, shut up) when the remains of Hurricane Ike came plowing through. Luckily, we started having power fluctuations early enough - and all of our important stuff is on big UPSs - that I was able to save everything and shut down before the power went out. Which happened about 4:00 pm. And it still wasn't back on by the time I left for work this morning. The local news said that about 350,000 people in central Ohio are out of power and that it may be up to a week before it's restored in some areas.
We got barely any rain, but the wind? Whoa. Sustained winds of 45 mph with gusts up 75 mph. Some of those "gusts" were of pretty long duration, too. At one point I heard this horrible ripping/cracking/tearing sound and looked out the front door to our friends across the street, who suddenly had only half a tree standing in their front yard. Luckily, it fell toward the street rather than the house, but the winds were so strong that rest of the tree was threatening to break off, too. Our next-door neighbor took his chainsaw over and *carefully* cut through the trunk so that the rest of the tree fell with as little damage as possible and we pulled it out of the road so no one would run into it.
This, of course, had me really worried about our trees out back. They're Sycamores that stand at least 80 feet tall and they're about 250 years old, according to the arborist we had out just before we bought the house. They're constantly "self-pruning" - dropping dead branches, some of which are called "widow-makers" for good reason - but I'd be devastated if they fell, because they're so beautiful and so much a part of why we bought the place.
While my husband and I were out rescuing the apples that the wind blew from our two apple trees (we filled a 5-gallon bucket with what fell to the ground), we heard a sound like a shotgun blast and looked up to see a ginormous branch fall from the biggest Sycamore, but that seemed to be the worst of it. *whew*
Now our biggest worry is the refrigerator. If we don't get power back soon, there's gonna be a big neighborhood cookout tonight...
We got barely any rain, but the wind? Whoa. Sustained winds of 45 mph with gusts up 75 mph. Some of those "gusts" were of pretty long duration, too. At one point I heard this horrible ripping/cracking/tearing sound and looked out the front door to our friends across the street, who suddenly had only half a tree standing in their front yard. Luckily, it fell toward the street rather than the house, but the winds were so strong that rest of the tree was threatening to break off, too. Our next-door neighbor took his chainsaw over and *carefully* cut through the trunk so that the rest of the tree fell with as little damage as possible and we pulled it out of the road so no one would run into it.
This, of course, had me really worried about our trees out back. They're Sycamores that stand at least 80 feet tall and they're about 250 years old, according to the arborist we had out just before we bought the house. They're constantly "self-pruning" - dropping dead branches, some of which are called "widow-makers" for good reason - but I'd be devastated if they fell, because they're so beautiful and so much a part of why we bought the place.
While my husband and I were out rescuing the apples that the wind blew from our two apple trees (we filled a 5-gallon bucket with what fell to the ground), we heard a sound like a shotgun blast and looked up to see a ginormous branch fall from the biggest Sycamore, but that seemed to be the worst of it. *whew*
Now our biggest worry is the refrigerator. If we don't get power back soon, there's gonna be a big neighborhood cookout tonight...