weather update

[hudebnik]

Now that there's some daylight, I walked around the neighborhood taking some better pictures. All of these are within three blocks of our house.


[Edit 9:15 AM: added a few more that didn't come out the first time I took them.]

from our front door

also from our front door

also also from our front door

the sidewalk in front of our house

the base of the tree that is now in our front yard

the same, closer up

another tree across the street that only lost a limb

the house three doors down

the cross street, taken from about thirty feet from our front door

the same, seen from the other direction

an intersection two blocks away

the same, from the other side

a garage two blocks from our house

a house two blocks away

the base of the same tree, which took a couple of limbs off another large tree

where those limbs landed

ditto (there's a motorcycle and a car in there)

a near miss

two blocks away in a different direction

the same, including the house we almost bought in 2001

Note that our neighborhood has a lot of big trees, and there seems no rhyme or reason to which ones came down and which still look perfectly fine.

Comments

[ellid.livejournal.com]

You definitely got a microburst. That lack of pattern is classic. Yikes!

[antoniseb.livejournal.com]

I know the whole thing has some impact on your lives (was your car spared?) but I was intrigued by the shot of the exposed pulled up roots. It is astounding to me, every time I see something like this, just how little support there is underground to keep the tree vertical.

Bullet Dodged

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

According to neighbors, stuff hit the fan last night c. 7 p.m. We didn't get home until 11:30 p.m., so we missed the drama.

(It is worth noting, however, that had we not gone to the event, it would be our car under the tree instead of our neighbor's MiL's car. Let it not be said that we never got anything out of SCA participation :->)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I imagine there's a selective process at work there -- trees with larger/stronger root systems aren't the ones that get blown down.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Yikes!

(/me goes to check on his folks)

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

But there are so many places that two trees of the same size and species, apparently equally healthy, were growing forty feet apart, one came up by the roots and the other lost only twigs. It's weird.

[hlinspjalda.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the problem is, but I don't see a single photo in this post. I've dinked around with the cursor and not run across any indications of unloaded images, either. Hmmm.

[ubiq31.livejournal.com]

Wow...I should check with my family...had no idea this had gone on in that area (my sister and her family is *really* close to you).

[fianaclare.livejournal.com]

What a shame to lose all those magnificent trees.

I suspect--from what I can see--that the issue has to do with the saturation of the ground and the way the root systems are formed. Those with shallower root systems would have weakened stability in ground that saturated.

The same thing happened to my tomato plant yesterday when it rained a great deal yesterday morning. Luckily, the tomato is too small to smash anyone's house or car. And they also make structures to shore up tomato plants. Trees . . . that's a different issue.

[melaniesuzanne.livejournal.com]

Oh my goodness! I'm so glad that you and yours are safe and sound.

I had no idea that your neighborhood was so verdant! I mean, having visited only Manhattan (that's where the Empire State Building is, right?), my mental image is that's how all of the city looks.

[ichseke.livejournal.com]

Holy cow! You do seem to have been downright lucky amid all this random destruction. Is there information yet about how (& when) it will all be cleared up? Yipes.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

Peculiar. Has anybody else had that problem?

If you really want, you could type in the URL's
http://www.adelphi.edu/sbloch/pics/morning%201.jpg
http://www.adelphi.edu/sbloch/pics/morning%202.jpg
...
http://www.adelphi.edu/sbloch/pics/morning%2021.jpg
directly.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

Did you ever watch "All in the Family"? That's roughly the kind of residential neighborhood we're in, although less blue-collar than Archie Bunker's neighborhood. In fact, if you remember the layout of the Bunkers' house, flip it left for right in a mirror, and enclose the porch, you've got our house. Some of the larger houses in the neighborhood are Victorians rather than Archies.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

Nice thing about living in a reasonably affluent, mostly-white neighborhood: the crews were here at 7:30 AM, and our street was clear by noon. Some other downed trees in the neighborhood were lower priority because they weren't blocking a street, but I think most of them were cleaned up by the end of yesterday.

It also helps that whatever hit us was very localized -- just within about five blocks of us -- so we weren't competing for tree-cutting resources with the rest of New York City.

[hlinspjalda.livejournal.com]

Curiouser and curioser! When I paste these in directly, I get:

"Not Found

The requested URL was not found on this server.

Due to a system upgrade, pages formerly hosted at panther.adelphi.edu are now hosted at oldpanther.adelphi.edu. Please change your bookmarks and URLs accordingly."

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

That's really weird. I recognize that message, and yes, we're in the middle of migrating servers, but all of these pictures are on the NEW panther, not the old one. When I type in any of those URL's, I get a picture.

Try http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/pics/morning%201.jpg etc. (replacing the "www" with "home").

Corrections Ya Us

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

Actually, there are only three "Archie Bunkers" on our street (there was an oddly-shaped trapezoidal lot that apparently lay fallow until the 1910s, when somebody subdivided it and put three one-room-wide "Colonial" houses--the aforementioned Archie Bunkers--on it); the rest are a mixture of Queen Anne [Victorian], Tudor, and [large] Colonial.