Tree branches down....

Saturday, January 13 1:30PM--

I had to go feed my Mom's cats, as she is out of town....but this doubled as an opportunity to take a mini-tour of the area to survey Ice Storm damage.

Do you ever think about how a tree might fall on your car while you are driving? No? Me neither, because the chances are probably one-in-a-million of it ever happening. But this morning, the chances felt a lot more like one-in-one hundred, or one-in-fifty.

In our neighborhood, boughs were drooping over the road everywhere, with that depressed look about them that I tend to have when I am thinking about my mortgage....you had the feeling that if a bird were to land on one of those branches as you passed underneath, you were going to be talking to your insurance company later today.

Along Ladue Road, there was sawdust in numerous places... evidence that trees or large branches has just recently been chainsawed away to re-open the road. And on the way home, a road crew was busy removing a newly fallen branch that had not been there just 20 minutes before, when I had been coming from the other direction...

What does all of this mean? Well, I think this could spell serious trouble tonight and tomorrow for these poor trees, that got their collective wooden asses kicked during the November 30th storm, and then again last night. If we get a lot more Freezing rain (and we are forecast to get just that, tonight and tomorrow), the downed trees could number in the thousands, and power outages could be extreme.

-WD