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Saturday, August 3

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I am going to back up a bit to a previous rain and windstorm that happened earlier in the week.

Our son Jeff came to our place about 9:45 am yesterday (Saturday) to remove a few large branches that fell from that storm.

I took this picture about 3:44 pm on Saturday afternoon when a fairly heavy rain and windstorm came from the west.

Then, a few minutes later, 3:53 pm, the wind and rain changed and came whipping in from the southeast. We almost never get storms from that direction.

Cerwin was standing at the living room window when he saw the tree uproot and said, “Watch out, there is a tree coming down on the house.”

I was at the dining area window – where I take a lot of the scenery pictures from our house. This is what I saw in place of the wind, rain, and hail, two pictures earlier. It was kind of surreal without a lot of noise. In this picture you can see that the spouting was damaged, because rain was pouring down in front of me.

After the wind and rain slowed down, we went outside to survey the tree. It is an old hickory tree that was here in 1967 when we built the house. We didn’t think we had to worry about it falling on the house because it leaned fairly strongly to the south.

The strong wind made it happen despite our calculations.

That is when we noticed the tree barely had a root system despite the fact that the tree and the leaves appeared to be healthy.

While outside, we noticed that the wind also took down our pretty pear tree.

You will notice our deck chairs in the back on the left. We thought maybe they had been damaged, but Jeff and Jere pulled them out from under the branches and found no damage.

It appears that the wind just twisted the pear tree off a few feet in the air. It was a young tree, planted about 5 years ago.

Our sons pulled the branches off the driveway so cleanup vehicles had room to park.

There was also some damage to a few trees in the woodsy area behind our yard.

Our first call was to our sons, then All Season Tree service, and our insurance company. If you follow my blog, you are familiar with the times All Season comes to our property to remove trees that concern us – or when there is tree damage.

We called Amos about 4 pm (on a Saturday evening). He said they will be here by 6 pm. They arrived about 5:45.

We were wondering how he would remove the tree from our house without more damage to the roof, but this wasn’t their first rodeo. As a matter of fact, this is the fourth tree they removed from a house in two days.

Removing some lighter branches.

After removing the lighter branches, they located the pressure point on the house, and lifted the heavy branch from the roof with this S95TS skid loader.

That is when we could see some of the damage.

In this picture you can see the window (second from left) where I was standing to take pictures of the storm, and the window (right) where Cerwin was standing when he saw the tree uproot.

Removing the large branch.

After the tree was off the roof, we sent a few pictures to Dustan our grandson-in-law of Rohrer Bros. Residential Enhancements, to let him know we would need their expert repair services.

The overhang is bent enough that we cannot go out the front door. We were surprised that there was no damage to our porch fencing.

The tree service will return early this week to cut up and remove the branches.

It still surprises me when I look out a window and see this.

Today when I surveyed the damage, I noticed some spouting stuck in the branches.

This morning, we noticed that the corn was still leaning in a variety of directions, but by the time we came home from church it was nice and straight again.

God is good all the time.

If the storm had taken the tree another foot or two to the right, there would have been a lot more roof damage.