Windy city
The past few days have been unusually windy in Portland. For a couple of days, the winds were staying steady around 20mph, with gusts up to 40mph. Seeing as how the city is full of trees, it creates a bit of a danger for residents living near large, unstable trees....
My long Sunday began at about 3:30AM. Josh and I were sleeping peacefully in our bed, when I was awoken by the sound of him cursing about something. Apparently, he had pulled a muscle sitting up suddenly in the bed. What made him jump up so quickly? The window right above our bed had been broken by flying debris (yes, I somehow slept through that!). Opening up the curtain, I could see shards of glass covering the windowsill, as well as a couple of small pine cones. Being half asleep, I didn't really know what to do at first, and then Josh told me to go get something to cover the window (he was still trying to recover from his pulled muscle). I came back into the bedroom with some plastic sacks and a small piece of cardboard to cover what I thought was a marginal hole created by the pine cones. When I pulled up the blind, I saw that it was no small hole; almost the entire 44 inch tall window had been shattered. Turns out that it hadn't been just a couple of pine cones that had broken the window, but an entire tree branch had come flying and crashed against the window, which was then resting atop the awning above the front door. With Josh now up and about, we went to the garage to get some larger pieces of cardboard from the recycling bin (good thing I had not yet recycled the kotatsu box!). We cut some down and managed to fit one of the pieces into the window frame, but the second piece we had just wouldn't fit, so we tried taping it in place. However, we didn't have any tape in the house besides cheap, flimsy scotch tape, so we knew it had no chance of holding, especially with the winds still howling. We decided to go back to sleep, but not in our main bedroom since the cardboard wasn't really doing anything to keep the near-freezing winds from entering. Josh took the bed in the spare bedroom, and I went downstairs to sleep on the couch, hoping to get a decent night of sleep before getting up to go to work in the morning.
That restful night of sleep was not to be. At around 6:00AM, I woke up when I heard a large crash outside. I jumped up from the couch, worrying that the windows in the hallway leading to the front door may have been broken by more flying debris. I looked at the windows, and I couldn't feel any air coming through them, though in the darkness I could see that it looked like there was something outside of them, but I couldn't make out what it was. I looked out the window in the front door and could vaguely see a lot of green. I thought that perhaps some more branches had come flying off the nearby trees and landed on our porch. By this time, Josh had made it downstairs, asking what had happened, and I opened the door expecting to see some more fallen branches....but it turned out to be a whole lot more. A tree from a neighboring yard had come crashing down, landing right between our condo and the one next to it....and Josh's car was under it. It was just a huge shock to look right outside our front door and see a giant ass tree right there by our porch. Many neighbors came out to see what had happened, including the ones whose yard it had fallen from; their house was also damaged by another tree that had fallen down that night. Though the car was totally incapacitated, our home ended up getting through pretty OK: there was some damaged siding, a small hole near the edge of the roof where a branch had pierced it, and part of the gutter came down with the tree; the neighbor on the other side of where the tree fell suffered similar damages, though not quite as bad as the ones on our side.
There was a bit of panic spreading around shortly after the tree fell. There were still other tall trees swaying in the wind nearby, so would another come down before the night was over? The tree that crushed the car had fallen across the driveway, so other residents further into the condo complex had no way of getting their cars out until the tree was cleared. The HOA president called the fire department to tell them what had happened, and they had recommended that people leave their homes until the winds died down, but most had no way to leave since they were blocked in. Also, since it was early on a Sunday morning, there were not any places open yet to come and remove the debris. The question also came up quickly about insurance. Was it the responsibility of our car/home insurance to pay for the damages done to our property, or did the neighbors whose property the tree fell from have to take care of it? There were a lot of questions with no answers at the time, and not much we could do until a bit later in the day, so I tried to go back to sleep, but after all of the excitement, there was no way I could calm down enough to rest.
Later in the morning, around 9:00AM, my parents came over to see what they could do to help us out. I had told them over the phone that Josh's car had been crushed, but once they saw it they were still shocked at how thoroughly destroyed it actually was. While they worked on putting some plywood over our bedroom window, I dutifully headed off to work (Josh, having no transportation, called out that day). Frankly, even though I'd barely had any sleep the previous night, I figured work would be less stressful than dealing with all of the tree business. While I was gone, Josh and my parents managed to clean up the glass from the bedroom and secure plywood to the window; even though it doesn't keep the cold out, it at least keeps the wind from gushing in. Also, people came by and removed a section of the fallen tree so other neighbors could get out of the driveway. The insurance questions remained largely unanswered, except we found that we probably won't get anything for the car (at least, not from our own insurance). And as for the neighbors who own the property the tree fell from, they ended up having a segment on the local news that evening (Josh was also interviewed, but didn't end up making it in the broadcast). Apparently, they had asked the city months ago to let them remove the trees, since, due to undercutting of the roots by nearby housing construction, they knew that the trees were not stable and would probably fall during a big storm. The city didn't believe/listen to them, and so what they had feared came true. So now there's the possibility that those neighbors may sue the city for damages.
Even though it's a few days later, nothing has really changed. The bedroom window it still broken (though the pieces necessary to repair it should be on order). We're getting estimates to see how much it will cost to repair the damages to our house. And Josh's car remains in the driveway, waiting to see if it will be possible to sell whatever parts are still functional, and then scrapping the rest. Below are some of the pictures taken of the wreckage:
Looking from the driveway toward the front porch. Notice how my car really isn't too far away from where the tree fell. Had it come down at a different angle, my car, as well as more of our home, could have easily been destroyed.
The view from the front porch. This is what I saw when I first opened after hearing the loud crash. My reaction: *noticing the tree* "Oh, my god! *noticing the car* Oh, shit!"
So here's a riddle: if a tree falls on Josh's car, and there's no one around to stop it, can it still drive?
Answer: No way in hell.
A view into the neighbor's yard. Behind the fallen tree you can see the other unstable tree ready to fall at the next provocation.
Here's the window shattered by a flying branch hours before the tree came down.
This is where the upper part of the tree lies, between our condo and the one next to us (ours is on the left side of the photo). Gutters are down, siding is damaged, but somehow the windows stayed intact, even the one that has that branch looking like it's about to poke through it.
A look at the driveway after being cleared of the debris (Josh's car kind of looks like a convertible....it just has the top down!)
A picture of me with a special memento to remember this experience by.
It's amazing to think how certain circumstances could have completely changed the situation. For one, Josh had been planning to take his car to the mechanic to have his brakes looked at. He was going to take it Saturday night, but he ran out of time due to other plans he'd made, so we were going to drop it off Sunday morning. If only he'd had the time to drop it off that night, it wouldn't have been there in the morning to be crushed. Another possible situation is that my car could have been the one parked in that spot. A friend came over Saturday, and we went out for dinner, taking her car. If we had taken my car instead, Josh, who was out at the time we left, would have come home and parked in the driveway, while I would have parked in the spot in front of the house when I returned. So it's a little bit of a relief that my newer, more valuable car was the one that ended up being OK. Still, that old car had a lot of sentimental value attached to it. A 1989 Mercury, it just celebrated its 20th birthday. The car was given to me by my grandmother in the year 2005, when she became no longer able to drive several months before she passed away. It was the first car I ever owned, and a few months after we got married, it became Josh's main mode of transportation after I received a car from my dad when he gave me his old one after buying a new one. Another bit of sentimentality attached to the old Mercury is something that was inside it when it was crushed: my Sailor Moon cassette tapes. Since the car didn't have a CD player, I kept all of my cassette tapes in there, which consisted mostly of Sailor Moon songs copied from other tapes or CDs. Sure, I suppose I could easily buy the CDs or download the songs in this day and age, but I can't help but feel nostalgic for those decade old tapes that provided me with my first taste of the world of Japanese music.
RIP, old Mercury. You hung on a lot longer than many had expected, only to be cut down at a time when you probably had a decent amount of miles still left in you. Thanks for getting me through the recent snowstorm, when the tires on my newer car proved to be not nearly as reliable as yours. Your years of service were greatly valued.
My long Sunday began at about 3:30AM. Josh and I were sleeping peacefully in our bed, when I was awoken by the sound of him cursing about something. Apparently, he had pulled a muscle sitting up suddenly in the bed. What made him jump up so quickly? The window right above our bed had been broken by flying debris (yes, I somehow slept through that!). Opening up the curtain, I could see shards of glass covering the windowsill, as well as a couple of small pine cones. Being half asleep, I didn't really know what to do at first, and then Josh told me to go get something to cover the window (he was still trying to recover from his pulled muscle). I came back into the bedroom with some plastic sacks and a small piece of cardboard to cover what I thought was a marginal hole created by the pine cones. When I pulled up the blind, I saw that it was no small hole; almost the entire 44 inch tall window had been shattered. Turns out that it hadn't been just a couple of pine cones that had broken the window, but an entire tree branch had come flying and crashed against the window, which was then resting atop the awning above the front door. With Josh now up and about, we went to the garage to get some larger pieces of cardboard from the recycling bin (good thing I had not yet recycled the kotatsu box!). We cut some down and managed to fit one of the pieces into the window frame, but the second piece we had just wouldn't fit, so we tried taping it in place. However, we didn't have any tape in the house besides cheap, flimsy scotch tape, so we knew it had no chance of holding, especially with the winds still howling. We decided to go back to sleep, but not in our main bedroom since the cardboard wasn't really doing anything to keep the near-freezing winds from entering. Josh took the bed in the spare bedroom, and I went downstairs to sleep on the couch, hoping to get a decent night of sleep before getting up to go to work in the morning.
That restful night of sleep was not to be. At around 6:00AM, I woke up when I heard a large crash outside. I jumped up from the couch, worrying that the windows in the hallway leading to the front door may have been broken by more flying debris. I looked at the windows, and I couldn't feel any air coming through them, though in the darkness I could see that it looked like there was something outside of them, but I couldn't make out what it was. I looked out the window in the front door and could vaguely see a lot of green. I thought that perhaps some more branches had come flying off the nearby trees and landed on our porch. By this time, Josh had made it downstairs, asking what had happened, and I opened the door expecting to see some more fallen branches....but it turned out to be a whole lot more. A tree from a neighboring yard had come crashing down, landing right between our condo and the one next to it....and Josh's car was under it. It was just a huge shock to look right outside our front door and see a giant ass tree right there by our porch. Many neighbors came out to see what had happened, including the ones whose yard it had fallen from; their house was also damaged by another tree that had fallen down that night. Though the car was totally incapacitated, our home ended up getting through pretty OK: there was some damaged siding, a small hole near the edge of the roof where a branch had pierced it, and part of the gutter came down with the tree; the neighbor on the other side of where the tree fell suffered similar damages, though not quite as bad as the ones on our side.
There was a bit of panic spreading around shortly after the tree fell. There were still other tall trees swaying in the wind nearby, so would another come down before the night was over? The tree that crushed the car had fallen across the driveway, so other residents further into the condo complex had no way of getting their cars out until the tree was cleared. The HOA president called the fire department to tell them what had happened, and they had recommended that people leave their homes until the winds died down, but most had no way to leave since they were blocked in. Also, since it was early on a Sunday morning, there were not any places open yet to come and remove the debris. The question also came up quickly about insurance. Was it the responsibility of our car/home insurance to pay for the damages done to our property, or did the neighbors whose property the tree fell from have to take care of it? There were a lot of questions with no answers at the time, and not much we could do until a bit later in the day, so I tried to go back to sleep, but after all of the excitement, there was no way I could calm down enough to rest.
Later in the morning, around 9:00AM, my parents came over to see what they could do to help us out. I had told them over the phone that Josh's car had been crushed, but once they saw it they were still shocked at how thoroughly destroyed it actually was. While they worked on putting some plywood over our bedroom window, I dutifully headed off to work (Josh, having no transportation, called out that day). Frankly, even though I'd barely had any sleep the previous night, I figured work would be less stressful than dealing with all of the tree business. While I was gone, Josh and my parents managed to clean up the glass from the bedroom and secure plywood to the window; even though it doesn't keep the cold out, it at least keeps the wind from gushing in. Also, people came by and removed a section of the fallen tree so other neighbors could get out of the driveway. The insurance questions remained largely unanswered, except we found that we probably won't get anything for the car (at least, not from our own insurance). And as for the neighbors who own the property the tree fell from, they ended up having a segment on the local news that evening (Josh was also interviewed, but didn't end up making it in the broadcast). Apparently, they had asked the city months ago to let them remove the trees, since, due to undercutting of the roots by nearby housing construction, they knew that the trees were not stable and would probably fall during a big storm. The city didn't believe/listen to them, and so what they had feared came true. So now there's the possibility that those neighbors may sue the city for damages.
Even though it's a few days later, nothing has really changed. The bedroom window it still broken (though the pieces necessary to repair it should be on order). We're getting estimates to see how much it will cost to repair the damages to our house. And Josh's car remains in the driveway, waiting to see if it will be possible to sell whatever parts are still functional, and then scrapping the rest. Below are some of the pictures taken of the wreckage:
Looking from the driveway toward the front porch. Notice how my car really isn't too far away from where the tree fell. Had it come down at a different angle, my car, as well as more of our home, could have easily been destroyed.
The view from the front porch. This is what I saw when I first opened after hearing the loud crash. My reaction: *noticing the tree* "Oh, my god! *noticing the car* Oh, shit!"
So here's a riddle: if a tree falls on Josh's car, and there's no one around to stop it, can it still drive?
Answer: No way in hell.
A view into the neighbor's yard. Behind the fallen tree you can see the other unstable tree ready to fall at the next provocation.
Here's the window shattered by a flying branch hours before the tree came down.
This is where the upper part of the tree lies, between our condo and the one next to us (ours is on the left side of the photo). Gutters are down, siding is damaged, but somehow the windows stayed intact, even the one that has that branch looking like it's about to poke through it.
A look at the driveway after being cleared of the debris (Josh's car kind of looks like a convertible....it just has the top down!)
A picture of me with a special memento to remember this experience by.
It's amazing to think how certain circumstances could have completely changed the situation. For one, Josh had been planning to take his car to the mechanic to have his brakes looked at. He was going to take it Saturday night, but he ran out of time due to other plans he'd made, so we were going to drop it off Sunday morning. If only he'd had the time to drop it off that night, it wouldn't have been there in the morning to be crushed. Another possible situation is that my car could have been the one parked in that spot. A friend came over Saturday, and we went out for dinner, taking her car. If we had taken my car instead, Josh, who was out at the time we left, would have come home and parked in the driveway, while I would have parked in the spot in front of the house when I returned. So it's a little bit of a relief that my newer, more valuable car was the one that ended up being OK. Still, that old car had a lot of sentimental value attached to it. A 1989 Mercury, it just celebrated its 20th birthday. The car was given to me by my grandmother in the year 2005, when she became no longer able to drive several months before she passed away. It was the first car I ever owned, and a few months after we got married, it became Josh's main mode of transportation after I received a car from my dad when he gave me his old one after buying a new one. Another bit of sentimentality attached to the old Mercury is something that was inside it when it was crushed: my Sailor Moon cassette tapes. Since the car didn't have a CD player, I kept all of my cassette tapes in there, which consisted mostly of Sailor Moon songs copied from other tapes or CDs. Sure, I suppose I could easily buy the CDs or download the songs in this day and age, but I can't help but feel nostalgic for those decade old tapes that provided me with my first taste of the world of Japanese music.
RIP, old Mercury. You hung on a lot longer than many had expected, only to be cut down at a time when you probably had a decent amount of miles still left in you. Thanks for getting me through the recent snowstorm, when the tires on my newer car proved to be not nearly as reliable as yours. Your years of service were greatly valued.