Practice needed

Clearly we’re going to need to practice our evacuation plan.
 

Yesterday afternoon a tornado warning popped up very unexpectedly. Not that they are ever expected, but even the morning’s weather forecast didn’t hint at this possibility. The path of the warning area included my cabin, so I got ready to inhabit my basement with the dogs for a while.

What a fiasco that turned out to be!

First, an explanation: my basement is really just a partially underground area for the utility mechanicals of my abode. The end with the door is about 2 feet below the ground surface. The back end of the area is about 5 feet underground. I don’t have stairs down into it, so that first nearly 2 foot step is a big one.

So here I am with a tornado warning and multiple dogs trying to get them into the basement. The puppies were afraid and didn’t want to jump down those two feet. So I got Baby Dog, my big dog, to go first. She went in, but as I was then trying to get Sparrow into the basement, Baby Dog jumped out, all the while Skye is practicing his mule impersonation, planting his feet and pulling backwards for all he’s worth. Before I knew it I was as tangled as a Gordian knot with leashes and dogs.

The tornado warning expired before we eventually got in there. Fortunately, the tornado never touched ground. But if this had been an actual emergency, we’d all have been killed before I got the dogs into that basement. Clearly we have some work to do before the next one.

Damaged

My climb up the ski slopes on Wednesday evening gave me a different view of the tornado damage that occurred on Roundtop a year ago in April. Starting this spring Roundtop hired a logging company to remove and salvage the wood from as many of the downed trees as possible. The photo I took on Wednesday shows how the area looks now that logging is completed. From this distance it looks more like a park than a forest, though when I’m closer it still looks like a forest, though a badly damaged one.


The worst damaged area is about .3 mile from my cabin and I can still remember how that storm looked and sounded when it blasted down the hill. Last night I had another ominous-looking storm, with rolling black clouds that turned day the color of night. But last night’s storm couldn’t compare to the one that brought the tornado, fortunately. I’ll probably measure all future storms against that one. I tell people that was the worst storm I experienced in 20 years of living in the woods, and I hope I won’t be around the next time there’s another one. I’m not sure if the odds are in my favor for that or not.

Please, not again!

Roundtop Mountain and several counties surrounding are now under a tornado watch. The weather looks threatening, if not particularly tornado-ish to me at the moment. I’m guessing the critical time will be in the 5-6-7 p.m. time when the day will be at its warmest and the air at its most unstable.

Tornado watches are somewhat common. I’m guessing we see 5-8 of them a year. Tornado warnings, the alert that’s posted when someone actually sees one, are a lot less frequent, fortunately. As uncommon as they are here—after all I’m not in Kansas—I’m hoping the one that chewed up a lot of trees on Roundtop last April is the closest I’ll ever have to be to one. After that one, the odds should be heavily in my favor. Or so I tell myself.

Perhaps that’s why I’m so cavalier about today’s watch. I’ve been there. I’ve done that. “Lightning” or a tornado won’t strike twice in the same place. Right? Right?

Tornados miss! Camp begins tomorrow!

This whole tornado thing is getting old. Over the weekend, another two tornado warnings kept my nose in front of the Doppler radar when I would have preferred to be doing something, nearly anything, else. Both times the tornado clouds were close enough to me and the cabin so that I had to pay attention to them. So far this year my area has had 50% more tornado warnings than we usually have in an entire season, and we still have at least two months more to go of prime tornado time.

And it’s not just tornados. On Saturday about 15 air miles south of me, just under 4” of rain fell in 60-90 minutes, but up on my mountain there wasn’t a drop. How weird is that? The good news is that for the next few days the weather will be nice, even cool, which is much appreciated after the heat and humidity of recent days. I will try and take the nice weather at face value and not pay any attention to whatever will come afterwards, whatever that may be. I’ve had far too few nice days this spring to waste them lamenting that they won’t last nearly long enough.

Tomorrow is my first session of adventure camp for this year, and that should be a fun way to spend the day. This year I won’t be hiking with the kids. I’m one of the “stations” on their orienteering course, and I’ll be located down along the stream at the bottom of the mountain, where I hope we can find some minnows or crayfish or something that will engage this young video-game generation. For me the change from hiking up and down the mountain 6 times a day is a welcome one. Last year not one of my camp days was under 90 degrees, and by afternoon I was starting to drag. This year I’ll be sitting by a stream all day long enjoying the view—and the kids, too, I hope! I’ll let you know how it went on Wednesday.

Clean-up after Thursday's tornado continues at Roundtop. Two large electrical transmission towers that cut through the forest were twisted like tin foil, and crews have worked on them 24/7 throughout the weekend.  Giant crane trucks and long trucks carrying new metal pieces continue to clog the narrow road atop the mountain.  The trucks are staging in the parking lots at Roundtop until they are needed.  I can hear the trucks, occasionally, from the cabin.  Sometimes the sound is different enough or loud enough to make the dogs bark, which is a lot worse than the sound of the trucks. 

Spring bird migration is gaining intensity right now.  This weekend I spent a morning watching several black-throated blue warblers bounce around.  I was out working on the chicken pen yesterday morning when the warblers joined me.  It's kind of fun to be able to see them without binoculars and without developing "warbler neck" or "birder's neck" from looking nearly straight up for long periods of time trying to see thems.  The birds were quiet close and didn't seem to mind me moving around doing chores.  These lovely little blue warblers may be my favorite warbler, though chesnut-sided warblers are pretty high on my list, too. 

A pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks came to my father's feeders.  Grosbeaks usually don't breed quite this far south, but it's also unusual, I think, for the birds to be paired off their nesting territory.  The birds breed in New York state and even upstate Pennsylvania, so perhaps these will stay around. 

A robin is nesting in the crook of a low tree just behind the cabin.  When she is in her nest, she sinks down into it and is almost invisible.  The nest is close enough for photos, but I haven't seen much that is too exciting yet.  For now, it's enough to know where the nest is so I can keep an eye on it.

Today's photo is a redbud tree. A few of the tree's heart-shaped leaves are shown in the left. This year has been a decent, if not a spectacular, spring for this tree. I have several behind the cabin and several that line the lane up to the cabin.  One of the prettiest of the trees along the lane fell over sometime last fall, so the edge of the lane isn't quite as dense with them as before. 

This year the dogwood blooms aren't all that great.  It's hard to know if that's because of the fungus that's damaging and killing the trees or if this is just that kind of year.  The extent of both dogwood and redbud color is variable from year to year.  April was the wettest on record, and May isn't starting off much better, so finding a cause for this year's lack is complicated.

The tornado news here on the mountain is winding down.  I suspect it will take Roundtop at least a week to clear up the downed trees.  I don' t know how long it will take to fix the transmission towers, but work seems to be progressing well there, too.  I'm so grateful that the damage wasn't any worse than it was.  No one was injured here and damage to buildings was minimal, considering how much worse it could have been.

Confirmed: EF1 tornado

Last evening the weather was glorious, which is normal after any severe storm but feels a bit cruel, too. Under the bright sky after the tornado, the damage is somewhat worse than I first saw yesterday morning.

The vastly improved conditions gave me a chance to better look at the damage from the morning's storm.  Sometime yesterday the weather folks confirmed it was an EF1 tornado that caused the damage.  An EF1 tornado is the second least destructive on the scale of 0-5, with winds estimated at 86-110 mph.   Roundtop's weather station was just yards from the worst of the damage, though not in its direct path, and still managed to record a wind speed of 80 mph.  Probably this tornado was in the lower to middling part of the EF1 range. This photo shows the public Roundtop Rd. to the left and the driveway in to the ski resort branching off to the right.

I also learned yesterday that several of the buildings at Roundtop some relatively minor damage.  An old building that housed the original snow-making compressors was torn apart.  Those compressors hadn't been used in years and the building was old, and not in great condition.  Also the ski patrol chalet has a basketball-sized hole in it at one spot.  Currently, it's not known what caused that hole.

The forest on the hill across Roundtop Rd. from the resort's driveway is flattened.  The little pumphouse at the bottom of the photo looks okay, though.  The flattened trees extend uphill a short ways beyond the left side of this photo, but not too far.  I have noticed a few trees further up the hill that were damaged, but not so many, just a few deeper within the forest.

This last photo was taken along Roundtop's driveway this morning, and you can see just how many trees were flattened here. A whole phalanx of tree-trimming trucks were at work when I left this morning. By tonight, likely all that will be left are stumps.

My hope is that when trees are replanted to replace these, that they choose native species, oak and hickory perhaps, and not put in the ubiquitous Bradford pear or the like.

Tornado or straight line winds?

I am okay.  The dogs, cats and chickens are okay. The cabin is okay.  Even the trees around my cabin are okay, but just a few hundred yards away from my front door, things are not okay.

At 6 a.m. this morning either a tornado or straight-line winds blew across the mountain, at a speed of 80 mph, which was clocked at a weather station on Roundtop that a local TV station installed and which spits out weather info every 10 minutes.

I'd been awake since 4 a.m. by bad thunderstorms and heavy rain. I got up at my usual 5:30 a.m. and checked the weather radar.  A storm was coming my way, and the lightning and thunder started getting bad, so I turned the TV off.  At 5:45 my sister called to report we were under a tornado warning and that Roundtop was right in the path.

I grabbed the dogs, two cats and headed for the bathroom, the basement already getting some water in it, and besides, I didn't really want to go outside to get there, anyway.  Within a few minutes, the storm intensitified, and then the wind started to rise.  The wind and the noise started getting very loud and just kept building. I started hearing little things falling on my roof--just leaves and acorns, probably.  Then for 5 seconds it got very, very loud.  I won't say I heard the "freight train" but it was only a few steps below that. It sounded as though it was overhead but not actually on the cabin.  And just about when I was thinking this wasn't going to be good at all, it was gone.

So I gave it a few minutes, said "Whew" a few times and proceeded to take Dog for a walk, and when I got close to the lodge, that's when I saw the first of the damage.

The tree in the photo above is twisted, so until someone tells me different, I'm calling it a tornado.

As far as I could see, the lodge itself and surrounding buildings are okay. I saw some small pieces of building debris--flashing, mostly, or other small loose stuff and not a lot of that.

Across the road from the resort, over by that small building (a pump house), you can see trees in the forest just flattened by the wind.  The road itself is still blocked to traffic. I was finally able to get out by driving on a dirt road and then leaving by a normally-closed access road and avoiding this area. I don't know how far down the road the damage continues. I haven't been out that way yet and won't be able to get there until that part of the road is cleared.

Right now the sky is clearing, and the weather is improving. A few schools are closed.  There's lots of localized flooding but the main part of the storm is now over, and now the clean-up is underway.

Not fun at all

The first tornado warning of 2010 sent Baby Dog, Dog and me to the basement on Friday evening. Fortunately, nothing happened at my cabin or elsewhere. The tornado cloud stayed in the sky and apparently didn’t touch down, but the sky turned so black that I couldn’t even see out my tiny basement window for a few minutes. Hail soon followed for a few seconds, followed by some not-awfully close thunder and lightning and then the excitement was over.

I saw the tornado-ish looking cloud as I was driving home from work Friday evening. It looked like a huge, black jellyroll in the sky. Those are never good things.

The nasty weather reminded me that the time of year for such activity has arrived here on the mountain. Fortunately, I don’t see many tornados, but the summer thunderstorms can bring enough destruction and concern. Wind damage and the possibility of falling trees are always a threat. The possibility is always there but fortunately isn’t frequently realized.

More common are the weird things that lightning can do. My neighbor’s well pump got knocked out by it a few years ago. It’s also not uncommon for lightning to hit a nearby tree or a transformer. Electricity gets knocked out here fairly regularly, though it’s not all that common that it stays out for longer than 8-12 hours. This time of year, losing electricity for half a day is an annoyance but not a real hardship. In winter, that becomes a different story, mostly because of the possibility of the water pipes freezing. Once I lost electricity for just a few hours shy of a week—that wasn’t fun either.

The power line that supplies Roundtop and my cabin runs through the woods for about a mile, perhaps a bit more, before it reaches us. All it takes is one tree falling on it for the electricity to go out. And often the utility company waits until the storm passes or for daylight the next day to begin their search for which tree is causing the outage. Sometimes, they take so long to show up that my neighbor has taken to riding the power line himself to find the tree and report where it has fallen to try and speed things up.

Now that I have the chickens to worry about, in addition to the rest of the critters, I’m thinking I need to keep more water stored and on hand. No electricity means no well pump, too.