Winter 2002

Here are a few pictures of the winter of 2002, when we had one of the worst ice storms on record.
	This is a view of the front corner of the yard, along side the street. The reason the car has its brake lights on is because just down the street there is a tree down across the street. A couple hours later there was another tree down across the street about 300 feet on the other side of us. All night the night before, all day, and all night this night there were trees snapping all down in the woods. It's a really eerie sound in the middle of the night with no lights on anywhere and dead quiet. At least the second night no limbs fell on the house, but I still didn't sleep very much.
The two pictures below are of the oak at the end of the house. The first one shows how the limbs were piled up around the base of it. The second shows the crown of the tree and you can see why it broke up so bad, it still had leaves on it. They were dead, but hadn't fallen yet.

These next two pictures are a few of the trees in the back yard. The pine on the left is actually my neighbors and usually the limbs are above the top of the fence, which is just over six feet tall. You can see here they are touching the ground. Amazing they never did break. On the right is a sycamore that didn't do as well. You can see that it broke over about 12 feet up. That was a good thing though. If it had broken at ground level it would have been long enough to reach the fence and would have taken it out. As it was it stopped a couple feet short.

	The picture to the left shows some more limbs down, this time on a section of wire fence that goes down one side of the back yard. Lucky none of the limbs that landed on the fence were that large. It got bent up a little, but was still standing. A few days later we just lifted the ends off of the fence. Below are a few samples of the ice coating that was on everything. On the left is a dogwood bud encased in ice. Don't know why there were buds on the dogwoods this time of the year, but there they are. On the right is a close-up of the pine hanging over the fence. If it wasn't so destructive the ice would actually be kind of pretty. But being without power for a couple days tends to take the pretty part out.