Tornado: The Recovery

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Tornado vs. Trees   |   Tornado vs. Fence   |   The Recovery

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Trees Cleaned Up:

Big oak and pine removed in front

After storm: Trees down                      After cleanup:   Trees removed

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Bye-bye, Barn

Had to tear down and burn the poor barn.

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After new roof and siding:

To reassure you, the siding is all the same color - Prestige Beige. It just looks different with different lighting. Also, it is on straight, despite looking slanted in the first picture. That is an effect of reducing the size of the image.

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Timber

The farm has ... whoops... HAD a fair amount of good timber - oak, maple, hickory, walnut. The tornado did a lot of damage - uprooting and breaking. We had a timber cutter cut and take 13 large truck loads of timber to the sawmill. Too bad the market price was down due to so much downed timber being available after the storm.

 

The photo at the right shows what's left at the edge of the last open field in the back. The green line shows where the tree canopy used to be... in a solid mass. What's piled on the ground is the branches and logs that were not suitable for the sawmill. These are pretty much the way they fell.

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Mud

Who knew that the longest-lasting effect of a tornado was a yard full of mud?

You can see from the photos that the "clean-up" resulted in a mass of mud all around the house. I guess it should not be a surprise, once you count the various pieces of equipment involved.  Most of these either parked in or drove across the yard. That dragged mud onto the gravel driveway, making it part of the mud mess, too. The larger vehicles  tore up the driveway itself.

Tree removal crew - bobcat, large dump truck for branches and chips, chipper truck, various pick-up trucks. Left small branches and some wood chips and dips in the yard where the tree stumps once were.

Electric company - large vehicle to deliver new pole and dig new hole. Dumped sub-soil onto my flower bed.

Timber guys - large tractor with prongs on front, VERY large truck to haul off logs, several pick-up trucks

Roofers - large truck delivering shingles, large truck to haul off old shingles, several pick-up trucks. Left lots of nails and bits and pieces of shingles.

Siding guys - several pick-up trucks. Left bits of old siding and nails, but not as bad as the roofers did.

Stone mason - (technically not a repair but we replaced part of the vinyl siding with stone)  Dug down to add foundation, truck for delivering stone, pick-up trucks. Left stone chips and dried mortar.

Demolishing the storage shed  and removing its foundation - backhoe worked big time on this. Burned parts.

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What's Next?

Since the yard was already completely torn up, we decided that now was the time to add that garage we'd been wanting. Are we nuts??

So, the mud era continued and the repair to the lawn and landscaping had to wait until construction was well underway. The photos of the house above were actually taken just as we started the earth-moving part of the new construction.

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Tornado vs. Trees   |   Tornado vs. Fence   |   The Recovery