Wind in theory and practice

[gerisullivan]

In theory, I have something of a sense of the weird things wind can do. In practice, even. I well remember the tornado that hit Minneapolis in June of '81, the one that did a respectable job of shoving the neighbor's garage through Bob Hunter's back door.

I've seen some not-so-fair winds in my first two years here. Usually they leave the treetops doing the hootchie coochie and me glancing about, mentally measuring which ones would land on the house if their next back bend proved a bit beyond their level of endurance. But as I wrote a few hours ago, I'm down in a hollow. It's really rather protected.

So while I knew in theory that high winds could rip a window box off its brackets and send it crashing to the ground, the little voice inside my head would have said, "yeah, at somebody else's house, not mine" had I ever considered the actual possibility of such a thing happening. And if I hadn't been sitting right here, about 2-3 feet and one exterior wall away from said window box, I would never have credited the wind with the feat. Surely it must have been a deer wandering up and getting startled, knocking it loose. That would have explained the wild gyrations of the bird feeder, too.

Only it wasn't a deer. Not a deer, not any other nocturnal creature. It was all wind, roaring and blowing. Crash went the window box. The arc of the feeder exceeded 90 degrees.

I didn't know it could do that. Not in practice, at least.

Sometime in here, the wind tore the top off the Rubbermaid bin that sits just outside the mudroom door. The bin started out empty (it holds packages that arrive when I'm not here), but neither it or its top blew away. By the time I noticed it, the rain was within two inches of the top edge. The wind had knocked the downspout loose -- a common enough occurrence -- and the bin ended up catching some of the water pouring off the roof.

I put the window box back in place, tried to do what I could to bend the brackets back into place, and did what I could to comfort the pansies. Then I emptied the bin, reattached the downspout, and stared into the darkness, trying to get a better reading on just what it's like out there. It's still warm. Far warmer than I ever think of mid-November as being. Yep. It's the middle of the night and it's still 60 degrees Fahrenheit on the back deck.Then the wind started picking up again, and I decided inside was the better place to be.

Comments

[redbird]

It's being a weirdly mild November in this part of North America, at least in terms of temperature.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Yeesh!

May the winds moderate!

[thirdworld.livejournal.com]

Oy. Glad you are okay, but sorry you had all that fuss and hassle.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of Tim Flannery's explanation, in The Eternal Frontier, of US weather: Because there are no great east-west mountain ranges, our weather is tropical in the summer and arctic in the winter. You're getting some of that tropical weather now. Stay safe! Sounds like your house is actually holding up pretty well through all that wind and rain.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Yes, the Zeppelin Hangar is holding up well. Crossing fingers, knocking wood, and All That Jazz....

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Up here, we get (as you may have seen Randy describe it) what's called the Pineapple Express -- a wind current from the Hawaiis and central Pacific that lands right around here. It's super damp and warm. This is our wettest November on record, and might become our wettest month ever. I didn't read about how windy it's been, but it's felt pretty windy at times. Oh well.

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

I well remember the tornado that hit Minneapolis in June of '81, the one that did a respectable job of shoving the neighbor's garage through Bob Hunter's back door.

And which knocked over a tree in front of dd_b's house.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Good to see you posting again, even if it is about the wind knocking things over. I'll throw a few logs on the fire and think of you.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Thanks!