Friday, 9:00 AM. a 28 degrees F, wind NE, strong and gusty. It is snowing moderately hard and visibility is poor. The barometer stands at 29.80 and the humidity is 85%. The Noreaster continues. We were scheduled to go to Bill and Allene's farm in Oconomowoc, WI in the southern part of the state to help burn their prairie, butit is not fit to travel, and in any case they have had lots of rain and flooding (use the blog search engine to read about past prairie burns). We have rescheduled the burn for next Saturday.
Yesterday morning about 8:00 AM I was looking out the patio door watching the Noreaster, and just as our neighbor Kathleen was driving by on her way to work I heard a loud bang. She pulled her car over and I assumed she had had a blowout, but she soon went on her way again. I couldn't see anything amiss in the yard and environs, and thought maybe the high winds had sent someone's garbage can rumbling down the road. A while later I heard sirens, and I as I went to get the mail decided to check out the neighborhood. The cause of the big bang was a giant white pine on the corner of 9th and Manypenny that had been blown over by the gale force winds.
I stopped and picked my way around the emergency equipment and downed wires and took the above photos. This is a huge tree, probably planted when the nearby house was built, maybe ninety to one hundred years ago. I looked pretty closely at the prop roots, which were sheared off just below ground level, and I didn't see any obvious signs of rot. It looks as though the wind simply sheared off this immense tree. I wasn't able at the time to measure the trunk at breast height, but it has to be at least seventy or eighty inches in diameter. I have asked the city crew to try to make a clean saw cut at about that hight on the trunk so I can count the rings. It is entirely possible that the tree was a native, growing there before the house was built. White pine wood is brittle, but even so it took unbelievable force to just snap it off at the roots. This was a very heavily branched tree, full of needles, about eighty feet tall, and it must have presented itself to the wind like a boat under full sail.
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