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Posted by Sheman in Idaho [72.47.153.24] on Wednesday, June 06, 2012 at 12:33:53 :
In Reply to: Re: Wind storm in SW Idaho posted by Jerry in Idaho [69.59.83.175] on Wednesday, June 06, 2012 at 11:08:25 :
That's very true about the soft ground. Usually around here trees get broken off by wind or snow. Either the ground is dry when the summer thunderstorm squalls come through or it's frozen in the winter when we get heavy snow. But a few years ago we had an early wet snow before the ground had frozen, and trees were getting uprooted all over the place. The linemen were working constantly for 3 or 4 days as the snow kept coming down and trees kept falling over the lines, almost all of them uprooted rather than broken.
I guess that good thing about that is if you can get to them with a gyppo rig, they're not ruined for saw logs when they're uprooted like when they're broken. If the forest service was smart, they'd put out a salvage sale on the uprooted trees, at least the ones that are near roads, but these days by the time something like that grinds through the bureaucracy, the beetles and blue stain have set in and they're not worth anything.
It's rare to get much of a windstorm up here because the valleys are so narrow and go every which-way so the wind can't really get down into them. What we do have are "horizontal tornadoes" from thunderstorms now and then. You'll find a swath of trees maybe 50 yards wide and a quarter mile long all blown down facing the same direction. I've yet to see one hit a house, but that just luck. Had one on my place a few years ago where it looked like the wind came straight down out of the sky, hit the ground, and then went outward in two opposite directions from there. There was no way I could get to any of the logs (not even with a a PW) to salvage them, so they'll just rot.