Tree and Boat Carnage - 120 MPH Winds

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. How about 114 pictures? I think they are worth about two words: Holy shit! Major winds hit Western Washington last night. They landed within the San Juan Archipelago around 2:00 a.m. Roaring wind interspersed with buckets of pounding rain on my metal roof for hours. The ghostly howls wrapped around my house and then peeled off whispering, seemingly down the road in pursuit of other prey, then whap! a big rogue gust would let loose and slam against the house.

My house stayed steady thru the storm. I don't have trees directly around the house that are of any size. Though there are many around the shop and the periphery of my property. I woke up and I listened for awhile knowing that sitting up on this little bit of a hill, with not many trees I was pretty snug and safe. One thing that worries me though is all these windows I have upstairs. I have a full wall and partial ceiling of windows at one end of the room. So far so good on that front. Nothing broken.

Listening to the wind howl I knew a little down the road by the water, and in the woods it was hitting much harder and I worried about my friends. At 3 a.m. I marveled that we still had power. I reached out towards a light and all power went out. I went back to sleep and woke up again at 9 a.m. when the power went back on.

I had plans to go to the mainland today. I could still hear the wind but I checked on the web and the ferries were still running. I figured I would still go, it would just be a rocky ride. I came upstairs and gazed towards my shop. I could see my cedar tree and it had it's top snapped off! I bolted down the stairs. My boat! I went outside to find that the top of the cedar tree landed on my lumber pile to the right of my boat. It couldn't have landed any more perfectly. Hit my wooden boat and it would have been splinters. Kaput.

My giant gates that are at the entry of my property sailed with the wind and pulled forward off the hinges but weren't broken. Any major gust takes them for a ride no matter how much I bolt them down. This time the post I put in several feet of concrete pulled forward with them. I built them quite large and rather unwieldy but very artistically, someday I'll get the formula down to stay in place with major gusts.

I took off down the road and didn't get far. There was major activity going on. A tree that smashed a van, two large cedars one on each side of a trailer, and one on top of the trailer. 10:30 and there was a huge crew of island folk out with chainsaws and bulldozers working the trailer and car free.

It was immediately apparent that the damage was far more intensive on the island than anything I suffered at my place. I spent the rest of the day exploring the island taking photographs of the tree and boat carnage, spread across the island as well as listening to other peoples stories. I put photogrpahs up on Flickr and you can see them in a slide show or click individually here

I have heard that 120 m.p.h. winds were clocked here on the southend, 113 mid island. 105 in the village. The last storm a mere two weeks ago seemed to take down pines and willows. This storm snapped many cedars. We'll be cleaning up here for awhile.