# Storm...pics and funny video



## mcwlandscaping (Sep 8, 2005)

Thursday night, storm comes in. Luckily it wasn't just a little big colder or else every road would have been an ice rink, but things only froze to the trees!

Where to begin! Thursday night on my way home from the girlfriends there was already a real great deal of power outages. Around 10 my friend and i began driving around seeing how bad things were getting as well as getting branches out of main roads and what not. Come home to find a large silver maple tree in my yard on fire because it leaned into a power line...called the FD just to let them know and while we were on the phone the transformer blew in turn putting the fire out =] This is only the beginning. Friday morning, 12am no more power!

Friend and i decide to head to our houses and go to bed figuring we will be doing tree work the next day...what an understatement! Wake up to, obviously, no power and things looking like a tornado came through and just hit the trees and the power lines! I had to head to the GF's, usually takes 25 mins....took about 2 hours! Every road i went down i had to clear my way through until i usually wound up getting to a full tree in the road or power lines that i had no way of getting around....I was getting too pissed off to take pics at this point LOL.

Got the girlfriend back home and friend comes over and some of the cleanup begins. First thing we took care of was getting the broken Birch tree off and away from my friends Camaro...that was kinda important! Then we headed back to my house to take care of a big limb in my elderly neighbors yard as well as a small one in my yard that was in the way.

Once that was taken care of, we wired the generator up to the electric panel so that we would be able to get through until we got power back...paid $100 for the generator two years ago from a guy that used it maybe twice, 5000 watts, started second pull, worth it IMO =] It's not the biggest thing but it really came through for us! That night, everything was pitch black as no one had power, so just to add to the seasonal cheer, we made sure that the Christmas lights were one of the things we had powered by the generator! The neighbors loved it!

Anyway, back to Friday afternoon....we then spent a couple hours trying to get a rope around the branch in the tree we were trying to pull down! It was not a success! And saturday was extremely cold and we had other things going on despite the power issue!

Today! After a few more ideas that didn't work, dad thought we could use a fishing pole with a sinker on it to go up and over the branch and then use the line to pull the rope up! It worked, just not with the sinker but instead with a tennis ball/wire rig we made up really quickly! Once everything was rigged up, the spectical began!

Yes, you can see there is a little damage to the shed, easy fix though! We certainly weren't going to hire a tree company to take care of it as there are no wires near by. We figured if we didn't pull it out and just let it eventually fall, it would have fallen straight down into the shed which would have caused a lot more damage! The whole thing went pretty much to plan, and yes, this was planned out!

As you'll see, there are a couple more pics of the ice and whatnot, spent too much time in awe to remember to take pictures of all the damage...i'm sure there are a lot of pics online as this has made national news!

And at around 7:30 pm tonight, we got our power back! =] What really sucked though was last night before we all got home the water heater control module decided to take a dump and stop working. So that's tomorrow's project as well as continued cleanup from the storm!

Sorry if this was hard to follow, it's been a very eventful last couple days!

*sorry the video quality sucks, it looks a lot better in the original formatting!


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## austin23 (Sep 7, 2008)

Nice work with the makeshift throwball.


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## plowindiesel (Feb 20, 2008)

great idea with the tennis ball but more importantly, good to hear that you are ok


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## Mark13 (Dec 3, 2006)

Glad to hear you guys are ok and are getting everything cleaned up. Looks like your fisher spreader almost bit the dust in that one pic.


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## Supper Grassy (May 31, 2007)

Glad to hear that you are ok. how long do you think it will take them to restore power to the area


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## mcwlandscaping (Sep 8, 2005)

austin23;676914 said:


> Nice work with the makeshift throwball.





plowindiesel;677001 said:


> great idea with the tennis ball but more importantly, good to hear that you are ok


Thanks, we went through a lot of other ideas to get to that!



Mark13;677003 said:


> Glad to hear you guys are ok and are getting everything cleaned up. Looks like your fisher spreader almost bit the dust in that one pic.


lol, that thing is a junker, i wouldn't bother me one bit if it was destroyed!



Supper Grassy;677032 said:


> Glad to hear that you are ok. how long do you think it will take them to restore power to the area


For everyone to get power back is estimated to not be until this coming friday or saturday!


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## PORTER 05 (Dec 28, 2005)

holy cow that was bad, no offense i owna tree service and landscape company, i understand not hiring a tree company i would have charged proubly around $500 to remove that limb, but i wouldnt have hit the fence or the shed so thats even...

i cant bellieve people arent dieing up there by the hundreds pulling stuff liek this, stay safe man, and remember if you really need to remove somthing else paying is better than dieing or destroying somthing

ill tell you though, man that thing couldnt have hit the shed worse lol it went straight down and like stabbed the side of the shed, you should have kept on pulling as it was falling, i take it that you had that hooked up to a truck right???

good luck!


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## mcwlandscaping (Sep 8, 2005)

PORTER 05;677221 said:


> holy cow that was bad, no offense i owna tree service and landscape company, i understand not hiring a tree company i would have charged proubly around $500 to remove that limb, but i wouldnt have hit the fence or the shed so thats even...
> 
> i cant bellieve people arent dieing up there by the hundreds pulling stuff liek this, stay safe man, and remember if you really need to remove somthing else paying is better than dieing or destroying somthing
> 
> ...


We had fun and all in all will cost us about $20 to fix the shed as we have most of the materials. We anticipated a lot worse on the shed so we are happy. No, it's not the "right" way to do it but we certainly weren't climbing the tree or renting a boom trailer, and since no one was in an area where they could get hurt there really wasn't much reason not to do it =]


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## IDOCTORTREES (Dec 27, 2006)

Hire a pro.Save your life


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