Hurricane Gustav Update

Hurricanes are so different when you are not living in an apartment or your parents house. There is so much more to consider when its your place that's in danger.

We may not own our house, but its still home. The main thing that I was concerned about was our freezer full of great food. I had lots of redfish, deer meat, elk meat, sausage, and more. I didn't want to lose all of that. The other thing that I was very concerned about was the water oak near our kitchen window. The wind was blowing in the perfect direction to put it on our house, but that didn't happen. Actually, neither of my fears came true. I was able to keep my freezer cold with my neighbors help. They were nice enough to let me use their generators for a couple of hours a day to charge up my freezer. And the water oak only dropped one or two limbs throughout the storm.

We had electricity through most of the storm. Since our road has been cleared to make room for the new road we actually didn't have many problems with trees on the lines. I was actually the first person to mess up electricity. I had one of my cedar trees fall on the service line going to the house. Some how that knocked out half my houses' power and half the neighbor's power. It broke the connecting line from the road to our service line. About thirty minutes later a tree fell on the line across the street from us. It was a tree that was far from the road but it fell on a service line and pulled the line down from the road.

Seeing this storm come through was something that I had never seen. I didn't know how strong mother nature could be. It was incredible to see/hear the gust come through. We were standing outside watching the backyard mainly. Unfortunately we saw a lot of trees go down. Especially in the neighbors yard. Poor Mr. Benny had a lot of great oaks go down. I actually saw an oak tree pretty much explode when a gust of wind hit it. That was unbelievable. The guy on the side of him lost around 9 oak trees in the back yard, all of them up rooted.

After all was said and done we were all safe. No house damage around us, just a lot of trees to clean up.

Here are some pictures from the storm:

This is me walking around in the storm winds. I was running around to see trees fall.


Two cedar trees fell in the drive way.


This oak tree took one for the team. It was pretty much the only one with damage out of all of the live oaks in the front yard. It was able to shield the other trees from the bad wind.


The sycamore tree in the back yard just lost a lot of limbs.


Here is a distant look at Mr. Benny's trees.


Me cutting our way out of the drive way.


I will try and track down a picture of the size of my burn pile. It was the biggest that I have ever made.