We're sitting in the living room when the wind kicks up. We go to the west picture window and are watching. Soon one 40-50 year old cottonwood snapped and fell over.
Seconds later a second one went.
After we watched the fourth one fall, we looked at one another and said, "Do ya think we should take cover?"
Try rounding up 13 dogs and 6 cats and herding them to a safe place. We managed and everyone was accounted for with the exception of Edison.
The storm was very short-lived and we escaped without serious property damage.
Our trees are another story. We now have a clear view of the neighbor's house.
We lost a dozen large, old cottonwoods and another twenty had major limb damage from which they probably will not recover.
They fell like dominoes here.
And here.
I doubt that some of them will survive their wounds.
This gives a whole new meaning to topless!
These branches all came from the road...
...and even with them removed, the road still looks bad.
It was completely impassable. I started at my driveway and the neighbor started at his. We worked for over an hour just getting the big branches cleared.
It'll take me a lot longer to get the pastures cleaned up.
Our fence didn't fare too well ....
... but that's okay because it completely missed all of the vehicles.
Our kids had lots of stories to tell today. Several had trees on their houses and one child even had a fire. We were very, very fortunate. I'm claiming it's because I'm still not done painting the house. Had I been done, it would have wiped it out.
2 comments:
I'm glad you guys are all ok!
Wow!
Mom called us and said 70 mile hour storm just blew through Scottsbluff and watch out.
So we went outside rounded up the animals and tried to decide if we should leave the 4H calves in the barn or out. Because you all have seen our barn and the rest of the out buildings. One strong wind and down they will come. We took our chances and didn't lock them out of the barn, mostly because we don't have enough panels to block all the holes. We loaded up the dogs and started over to the ranch to make sure things were tied down there.
But the storm was already at the ranch and we had only gone about a 1/4 mile from our house. The clouds above us were black and not very pretty. To the south and very west was the biggest wall of dirt I have ever seen. Dani said if you think that's bad look up above us, the clouds are moving in a circle. Sure enough there was rotation in the clouds in our front yard. So we go back into the house to wait out the storm.
About 10 minutes later the hail and winds had stopped, leaves littered the grass outside. Amazing there wasn't a single downed tree and we have about 20 of them that should have gone. All the outbuildings were standing, no broken windows, nothing. Drove to the ranch and all 24 circles of farm ground received some major hail damage, but all the sprinklers were standing and so were the power lines. We did have cattle that broke through fence and had to fix some fence. We were very fortunate.
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