Ah!!!! Trees!!! (Localized Natural Disasters)

[DefunctTheory]

I just came back from a week spent in Washington DC with a friend, to find that during my absence, a micro twister landed at my house and brutalized the trees nearby. Somehow, despite the extensive tree fall, the house was unharmed. Our shed wasn't so lucky.

Here's some pictures of the after math (Note that clean up has already begun).

Spoiler: A tree across the road

Spoiler: The side yard

Spoiler: And the dozy that took out or shed and rear deck

You can't see it in that picture, but the only thing keeping the tree up is some shelfing my dad and I installed a couple of months ago. We made something far more robust then we first thought.

Just thought I'd share. Note that every single tree picture could have taken out the entire house if it had just swung the other way.

Anyone else's house had a close call?

 

[Bofus Teefus]

Um... yeah.

I've lived mostly in the Desert Southwest (S. Nevada, S. California, and Arizona.) No real weather there. It gets hot, it cools off, it rains once in awhile. In 2006, I moved to Columbus, OH, which has far more interesting weather than anywhere else I'd lived. Luckily I had a friend who had moved out a couple years prior, and was able to introduce me to the lame city and it's weather.

I'd only been there about a month when our first good storm blew through. A few days prior, my friend had given me some signs to watch for for tornadoes, which are a small risk in the area, but still a risk. The ones that stood out and are relevant were hail, green sky, and stillness in the air following strong wind.

So... the storm rolls in, and I was sitting next to my bigass window, at my computer, studying with a noisy, rainy, thundery, windy storm outside. I heard a couple of little hail stones hit my window, looked up at the closed blinds to see green light pouring through, and realized that the wind seemed to have died off. Like a moron, I opened the blinds, put my nose up to the window, and started processing what my friend had told me to watch for. A few seconds later, the wind laid the trees across the street almost on their sides and started blasting my window with hail. I sat for almost a full minute... at the window... with horizontal hail bouncing off of it.

Turned out a funnel cloud had passed above, and just not touched down. The hail left my car pitted from one end to the other. Irritating, but lucky the window didn't shatter in my face.

 

[Aerosteam]

Here's a video a friend of mine took:


This happened down the street from me, luckily our house was built on a hill. Same can't be said for someone else, who lived closer to the river that dramatically increased in depth (both of his cars fell in). I bit into the video you can hear my friend say that guy's house was about to collapse, it didn't but that's what I thought as well. Later you can see where a bridge *used* to be.

 

[Remus]

That looks like a stream just down the road and around the corner from my house. It's a little woodland stream - big enough for deer to drink out of but not much else. Most of the time people could dig in the gravel hunting for spearheads, arrowheads, fossils. Well, last year it turned my neighbor's cow field into a flood plane, cresting 6 feet over normal levels and flowing over the road. This lasted maybe 10 minutes before the stream leveled out and the road was drivable again. In the 45 years my parents have lived on the property this was a first for them. So yay climate change, source of all manner of freak weather events!

 

[Thedutchjelle]

We've never had anything really threatening our buildings here, despite living roughly 5-6 m below sea level. We do have some trees in this street but none have trunks big enough to cause any damage if flipped over to anything else then cars.
Houses are all made of brick here though, so unless storms get insane there's not a whole lot that will happen. Biggest thing that happened in the twenty years I lived here was a over-capacity drain system, which caused an ankledeep flood in the street. Not really all that scary and didn't do any damage.

You on the other hand.. I love the forest around you house, but damn. You almost lost everything.

 

[Guffe]

Finland is very neutral when it come sot weather and very seldom any trees fall over badly, sure almost every year some tree fall from bad wind and breaks electricity lines or similar.

But mostly just extreme cold every third winter or so.

 

[Mr Fixit]

Living in northeast Tennessee we get all 4 seasons & just about every type of weather that goes along with that, just usually not in the extremes that other places get. I love watching storms, lightning & thunder are just awesome to me. Many days I've just sat on my porch while storms raged, mostly because we lose power at the slightest drop of rain so not much else to do than watch the storm.

Tornadoes are a fairly rare thing where I live, but the wind can still get pretty nasty. So one stormy day I was standing in the house looking out our screen door, just staring like an idiot, watching the storm. Then suddenly the sky gets very dark, the wind picks up & I think there was even a bit of hail when suddenly I see dark cloudy sky where the roof of our porch should have been. No tornado, the wind just peeled the metal roof panels back like they were paper.

I've been trapped at my house for a couple days from floods more than once, a small price to pay living close to a nice little river.

The winters here aren't too bad, usually just cold & enough snow to make driving tricky. Most people freak out about a half inch of snow around here, but it has to get a few inches deep before it bothers me. I've spent several days completely snowed in by a foot of snow & more, that usually knocks the power out too.