Weak Trees

Again with the falling trees!!! The house has some of the weakest trees around!

Yesterday around 7:10pm Abby and I were sitting on the window sill bench in our master bedroom watching a thunderstorm come thru. This picture I took of our HDTV is of local WFAA-DT Channel 8.3 was just after the storm hit. Our house is located practically right in the middle of the "O" in the name "Bedford". You can see the gust front on the radar. It's the green line that runs from Keller to Midlothian. (BTW, clicking on any of these pictures will get ya a larger version. Just click on Back in your browser to return to this blog.)


Abby's been a bit afraid of thunder but slowly I'm getting her use to it so she's not so scared of storms. The rain started falling and within 30 seconds I saw a large gray cloud appear to the northeast over my neighbor's house. It swooped down VERY quickly towards us bringing a large amount of rain and wind. Then at that moment a large branch from the tree right outside fell in front of the window. I grabbed Abby and pulled her back from the window. She was saying over and over "OH MY GOSH!! OH MY GOSH!!".

The storm was short lived. We soon went outside to survey the damage. The window with the blind pulled up is where we were sitting.

Luckily, we were OK and the branch didn't break anything on the patio either.


Here you can see the place it broke off from. Another branch is still hanging from the tree.


At 10am this morning, my father-in-law and his co-worker Jose Manual arrived to cut down the broken branch and cut up all the other pieces.



He also cut down a dead tree we had across the cul-de-sac from us.


I guess it's just less leaves I'll have to worry about this fall.

NOAA's Summary

OK, last posting about that storm. One of the local radio scanner boards posted this link to the NOAA summary of the storm. Seems they estimate the wind we got here at home to be 70+ MPH. That's kinda my estimate from watching the video.

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/fwd/April0910/april0910.htm

W.

The aftermath of the storm

Wow, it's been a couple of days. To follow up on my earlier post regarding the storm. Here's what happened. A major line of thunderstorms moved thru the DFW area early Thursday morning (4/10/2008). Trees, power lines, and fences were down all over. Power was lost to thousands of homes. Luckily we escaped with no damage whatsoever.

This video clip below is from my security DVR focused on our front driveway. The camera and DVR run on a UPS made for a computer so that's why they stayed up and running even when the power is going up and down. I was impressed by how well the mount stayed steady. It's a beefy camera mount but for it not to even wiggle at all... nice! The company who makes it is called RAM Mounting Systems.

My wife and I were awake at the time doing last minute tax preparation. When the winds hit, we grabbed our 3 year old daughter and I got them into closet in the master bedroom. The electronic wireless rain-gauge showed a 3.9 inches/hour rainfall at the peek of the storm.

A major power line was knocked down just south of my workplace. I work in a VERY large data center with a redundant power system. My employer also has a building across the street which houses hundreds of people. It doesn't have a power backup. When the outage hit they were moved to our building. My crew and I spend the entire day Thursday trying to setup workstations, phones, and network connections for everyone. We were stuffing folks in conference rooms, meeting rooms,... everyplace except the bathrooms which were busy places themselves. The thing is... we'll have to move them back early next week. :-(

Here's some other pictures of the damage I took while driving around the neighborhood. Click on the picture to goto Flicker to see the full pictures and info about the pics.









BTW, I found out the hard way that my security DVR outputs videos in an AVI format encoded with DirectShow (aka - Dshow) and YouTube doesn't like that format. I found some software on the web that will convert it to a plain-jane AVI format