Live oak in the fence; luckily no major damage.
We had a real humdinger of a storm in our area a couple of weeks ago. Actually we got hit with two storms in three days — one medium bad to soften us up and then one really bad two days later. Winds over 60 miles an hour and major thunderstorms — the sort cowboys call “gullywashers” for a good reason. There was so much water running down the ditch at the side of the highway that it gouged boulders as big as watermelons out of the creek bed and flung them on the road in what at first blush looked like a landslide. The force of the water widened the creek from a couple of feet to six or eight in some places, and while it didn’t actually undercut the roadbed, it came within an inch or so in several spots, as well as washing out the buried telephone cable on the downhill side.
Yesterday this was a road, not a stream bed.
The wind shredded the double tarps we had on the big sawmill.
The trees went from this…
…to this — in 24 hours.
We got off fairly lucky, all things considered. One big old pine tree that was dead came down — we had actually planned to take it out, so it saved us the trouble. A smaller live oak came down on the fence, but did almost no damage.
The chicken tractor started the night well to the right of the sheep. You can see the tire marks in the pasture.
The chicken tractor took wing and moved about forty feet until it banged into the sheep pen. Somewhere in the scrimmage, one section of the sheep pen roof blew off and it took us two days to find it. Of course the power went out but it was only for four hours in the middle of the night. We were just hooking up the generator when it came back on. The rains did wash Maybelle the milk cow clean for the first time since the muddy season started.
We humans forget sometimes how puny we really are.
