Setback...

Back online and with heat, light and cable TV after 6 days without. We live at the epicenter of the worst storm damage in ConEd history. Winds up to 70 mph blew all day and into the night, ripping shingles off the roof, and ultimately pulling the entire garage shingle layer off just before dark.

At about 7pm on March 13th, our 75 year old, 95' tall oak tree uprooted cleanly from the ground, which had been saturated by heavy snow pack and two weeks of rain. The tree came down, snapped off a telephone pole, pulled the power and telecom lines down onto our driveway, entrapping our cars, and landed in the middle of the street- all the way across it, actually.

Five minutes later, 3 of our 5 60' tall Honey Locust trees uprooted, and they came down on the house, hitting the chimney, putting two holes in the roof, snapping 3 rafters, and scaring children young and old. We had water coming into the kitchen and threatening the basement, no heat or light for many days, and no way to get our cars out of the driveway until today.

Within 1000 feet of our house, throughout Orchard Hill, there are about a half dozen more scenes just like this- huge trees across the road and a house, lines and poles down, etc. I counted over two dozen utility poles down or broken on a 1/2 hour walk. There are hundreds of trees down, and many, many big ones. Its incredible.

This has nothing to do with the Moonray, other than it is a pretty big impact on our family, requiring about all the time, money and energy we have to spare for a while. Bummer.

The good news is that no one was injured in the neighborhood, although a motorist was killed by a falling tree and power line a mile down the road. That's really all the good news there is at this point...

Notice the chimney sparing the roof corner, and the north wall of the house, from full impact...

Its hard to visualize how big this tree is. It was as high, though not so big around, as the tree still standing on the right- over 90 feet tall. The root mass in front of the house is sticking 10 feet out of the ground.

 Just look at how much of the formerly level ground was disturbed when this monster pushed over. On the right of this picture, my neighbor is about to get his car stuck in the spongy ground trying to drive from his driveway to the other neighbor's driveway, around the shattered pole and downed lines in the street. The pole still standing at the corner, with the street light on it, is pulled over and cracked at the base.