Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Snowstorm

Yesterday, after we were beginning to think Spring had sprung, we woke to a heavy snowfall. We received snow that we are not accustomed to in our area, heavy and very wet...8-10 inches of it. After my first moments of thinking how beautiful it all was, I began to realize that trees and shrubs were breaking under the weight.
I donned my waterproof duds and boots, and headed outside to 'rescue' the trees and plants. (An area of gardening I had not thought of before!) As I worked to bring up and out the branches buried under the snow, I heard ominous loud cracks all around the neighborhood. I discovered one not-so-great reason to live in a forest.

A large branch from a juniper tree broke off, and blocked our driveway. I heard another break and fall on our neighbor's motor home, and another tall tree across the street lost the top half as it broke.

This is the tree the branch broke away from.

It didn't do much harm, just mashed a shrub it fell on. It could have hit our wooden archway, and I'm so glad it didn't.
The insurance man got out a saw, and went to work. Pretty soon we had a big pile of pieces in our front yard. (still do) We had three other branches come down, one on top of our shed roof. It was smaller and doesn't appear to have done any harm. We drove around later in the neighborhood, and there were trees and branches down everywhere. There were 20,000 or so without power for 24 hours around town, but fortunately we were not one of them. The insurance man had no power at his office, and so it was closed for the day. Since he is sick with a cold, it was just as well. It was quite a storm for us.

2 comments:

Peter Jones said...

Thanks for posting the pictures. Peter and I enjoyed getting to see the results of your destructive precipitation. :)
Julie

Joy said...

That really is a big branch! Wow!