Just How Lucky

[gerisullivan]

I knew I got off easy from the ice storm that wreaked such havoc here in the Northeast. My power outage was measured in hours, not days. The phone was back soon, too. The storm derailed my Friday schedule and plans. It reminded me of the risks of not having a generator, and made me think about what options and resources I had at hand to help keep pipes from freezing. But the bottom line this time around was that I was lucky. I got off easy.

Monday afternoon, I saw for myself just how lucky I was. I drove west on the Mass Pike. For a 20-25 mile stretch between Westfield and Lee, somewhere between a third and half of the trees on the south side of the road were shattered, tops broken and gone. Tree trunks ended in the rough, raw end of a broken stick, 20, 30, 40 feet from the ground.

It was visually shocking. Stretch after stretch, mile after mile, clumps and clumps and clumps of 15, 20 and more trees all with their tops snapped, torn, dangling, missing. I passed hundreds, thousands. In between, partial destruction. Ten percent of the trees, a third of them, sometimes more. I doubt I saw 20,000 topped trees, but 10,000 seems conservative.

There was damage on the north side of the road, too. Broken branches, fallen trees. Birch after birch after birch...big ones...lay on the ground, stretching toward the road. There were some topped trees, too, but the south side of the road kept drawing my attention. These were just the trees I could see from the road. My mind croggles when I think of how far back the destruction might have stretched. Hell, my mind croggled at the destruction I saw.

It was all too easy to imagine, to envision, that kind of destruction of Toad Woods, not so far away. It could have so easily happened, given the destructiveness of the storm. It did happen...just not to my property. Monday I saw just how lucky I was, and that was lucky, indeed.

Comments

[lauriemann.livejournal.com]

My sister lives up in West Boylston (just north of Worcester). She reported that hearing the big branches snap off the trees last week sounded like bombs going off.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

I, for one, am glad you were lucky!

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that area was hit really hard, too. Bombs to the left of me, bombs to the right....

At Toad Woods, it sounded like there were a herd of very drunk deer thrashing through the forest, along with a few bears and caribou in the same condition. It took me a half hour or more to figure out what the sounds really were, to finally grok that the rain I thought I heard was significantly colder and thicker than it appeared to be right outside my door. The house warmed the ground near it enough, and it was warm enough out, that the pavement just felt wet and not at all icy.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Me, too!

Thanks. ;-)

[jcbemis.livejournal.com]

I have a friend in the online game I play who lives in one of the westirn suburbs of Boston (Newton? I don't remember) who had a tree fall on a line between the street and her house. they bought a generator Saturday I think, and are hoping they might get power back today(12/16)

[paradoox.livejournal.com]

Hum, I didn't see much destruction in Newton. In fact everything inside 128 pretty much escaped any damage. I think the ice line was mostly 495 to the west and dropping down a little to the north. If they were without power in Newton for 4 days there were very unlucky.

[jane-dennis.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you lucked out.

Lexington had had a devastating ice storm over the weekend of "Snowkone". We couldn't fly out of Boston until the Wednesday, but that was just as well, because when we got home, there was still no power - after 5 days! That was one of the coldest nights I've ever spent - luckily we got power back the following evening. Some people were without for 2 weeks. We lost our beautiful big old crabapple - had to climb through it to get in the front door, in fact. Thought we were going to lose the Yoshino cherry tress - it was literally split in two by another fallen tree, but as a testimony to the tenacity of nature, it has survived.

The visual experience was indeed shocking. Lexington looked like a war zone, trees shattered everywhere, and for as long as 2-3 months afterwards, streets were lined with long barricades of dead wood waiting to be picked up.

[lesliet-ma.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll try to leave a cheering thought. The trees you saw, at the edge of the road, were probably a bit more vulnerable because they were at the edge and didn't have the protection of a surrounding forest. So maybe once you get away from the road, things might not be so bad.

Still, this was a very sobering image you have conveyed.

[jcbemis.livejournal.com]

I was wrong - she is in Chelmsford, MA

[debgeisler.livejournal.com]

Wow. Your description makes this much more real than the pictures we've seen of Worcester and west. I'm glad we both got lucky this time.

[cogitationitis.livejournal.com]

It will be worse if we have a hot, dry summer. All those broken branches are ripe for a brush fire.

In New England, an "old growth forest" is a mere 200 years old, because trees rarely live past that in this climate--something will likely take them out within 200 years.