Hurricane Earl Wrap-Up

Well it was “just” a tropic storm when it hit us, but it was a thrill ride!

I’d say Earl was very similar to Noel in 2007, except Earl has hardly any rain in it (on this side of the eye anyway).

Two days later and our lawn is still crispy dry.

Here is the start of the rain:

But the rain didn’t last too long and the rest of the storm was just wind.

We lost power and decided to go down to the lake to watch the storm come in. Our driveway erosion got a little worse, but it was already bad.

We were without power for 6 hours. I have no idea how we got so lucky. Our neighbours just a couple km’s away just got their power back this afternoon, 48 hours later.

This tree kept them in the dark:

We have several trees damaged around our house, but nothing that is too serious. We have some ugly, half dead trees around the drainage hole in our lawn, south of the house, and one of them broke and is leaning now. We have been planning on cutting them down anyway.

This storm took down trees and limbs everywhere. There aren’t too many yards that don’t have at least a few large limbs down on their lawn. This is probably because the trees are still in full leaves and are more susceptible to damage. Leaves were flying by all day. (By the way, leaves hurt when they hit you when the winds are up around 100km/hr.)

Lots of short sticks with half a dozen leaves attached are all over the ground. The gravel road on the other side of the lake looks like mother nature was trying to disguise it by covering it with leaves and short sticks.

The side of our house has pulverized leaves stuck to it:

I didn’t see too many huge old healthy trees get knocked down. Some are blown over and ripped out of the ground. Most of the trees down are just large limbs off of trees. When we drove around yesterday we saw over a dozen trees on the lines between Sherbrooke and Sonora. Sherbrooke was alive with the sound of generators.

Here is a tree that was down behind our community centre down the road:

My black eyed susans took a serious lean:

Our green pepper plants in the garden all were pulled out by the roots and were lying flat in a row. Two of the red cabbages are pulled out too. All the tomato cages were all leaning. The beans are a mess, but were growing on stakes so they are still up.

A twitter friend who lives nearby on the ocean said all of her bedding plants and shrubs are dead from the salt spray off the ocean.

So, overall, we did really well. It was nice to have the storm hit during the day so we could watch, and not just be scared in the dark. And it was a real treat to have power back before dark. Jeff had just fired up the generator to plug the fridge in for awhile when the power kicked in.