Microburst

It's a rainy day today, and since the gardens have been mostly planted, I decided to begin another post. This one is a story of the microburst that we had on our cottage property about 10 years ago, which resulted in my redesigning the house that we were preparing to build out in our country property (in the city of Ottawa) on Dwyer Hill Road; we call it Due North. As you will see from the pictures, a microburst can overturn huge trees, ripping the root base right out of the ground. Since this happened to a large number of big trees, both white pines and many hardwoods, I changed the design of the new house to a 'modified post-and-beam' construction, which I'll show you details of in a later post. In the meantime, here is what happened in isolated places across our 400 area cottage property. The microburst usually moves across the land in a relative straight line, so the damage wasn't everywhere, but the damage was extensive, and I couldn't bear to just leaving the trees on the ground to rot over time. Hence the new house design incorporated them. Note: in this picture, the trees in this area were mostly white pines, but the microburst took down every kind of tree it contacted.

And so, the job began. After speaking to my neighbor up there, who is a logger, he was willing to 'skid' the logs out to a loading area, but wanted me to cut them into lengths no shorter than 20 feet. And so I was off to the races. The trick was to quickly process the wood into boards before the wood boring insects had time to get into it, and in the case of the white pines, before they begin to turn blue (which the clever Japanese salesmen call "denim" pine, and charge extra for the 'designer trees'!)  First I started cutting the pines lying on the ground into lengths. Note the root base of a second tree, near the top of the tree that I am working on, which was blown down in the same direction.

The picture below gives you a good idea of the size of the pines and the size of the root ball that had been ripped out of the ground.

After cutting up the trees that landed on the ground, I then began to climb into trees and deal with the mess above the ground.

And higher still to the top of the piles.

When cutting the trees on the ground, I had to be careful of where I was standing when I cut the log base, so that my feet didn't slip into a new hole the root ball often made when it fell back to the ground. On one occasion, when the ball crashed back to the ground, it created a new two foot-deep hole in the ground under my feet, and dropped me down to the depth of my knees between its roots.  Fortunately, the crisscrossing roots did not crush my legs as this happened!  Another of the real dangers in doing the base cut is that often the cut doesn't make it all the way through the trunk before the root ball falls back to earth. When this happens, it usually pulls the trunk forward in the same direction the ball fell, shooting the trunk right past where you were standing when making the base cut. Thus, there was the real concern that it could catch you in its passing movement and you would be crushed. Note below the white ash log that broke away from the base stump before I finished the cut from the root ball and landed several feet ahead of where I was working as the root ball crashed back to the earth. When this happens it often leaves a piece of wood attached to the stump (under my hand), which is ripped off the log when the ball falls back to ground.

Nancy shows the same tree from a different angle were you can see how many feet forward the main tree trunk has moved from where I had been cutting it, and broke away before I had finished sawing through the trunk.

For much of the time while I was cutting, I was at the cabin alone, so it was nice that some family checked on me periodically to see if I was still alive. Here my granddaughters Siobhan and Ceilah showed up to see what Grandpa was doing. They now are 17 and 15 years old!

Below, Nancy presents a different view of a typical big downed white pine before I cut it into lengths.

More often the tree trunks fell ahead of me, which was how a normal tree would behaved if the root ball was on your team and was not trying to kill you. This was one of the white ash trees in a hardwood area.

And a nice mature beech, where Nancy is just ahead of the top of the tree, with another root ball behind her.

Most of the big beech trees had been climbed over the years by the black bears who were harvesting the beech nuts way up in the canopy. Their claw marks remain on the trunks for years.

This picture shows the size of those beech trees; beeches that size will not be seen again any time soon because of the beech disease that has entered into this area.

After being cut into lengths, the trees were all skidded out of the bush to a central location where they could be loaded on a logging truck with an attached  'puppy' (a trailer for more logs) and brought to our house property on the edge of the city of Ottawa. We reside on a 100 acre property next to the Marlborough forest on the western edge of the city's claim; the latter is 16 thousand acres of protected 'city' forest. Delivery of the logs was a fun event for me.

This delivery procedure was necessarily repeated a second time with another load.

Then the truck and puppy were unloaded...

...and the logs were piled on the side of the driveway to await my sawyer.

As we were just finishing the new addition to our cottage at this same time, the grand old sugar maple next to the addition got a virus, which killed it, and I left it standing dead for a year. I really liked that tree, as it had had the kids' swing on it for years, and beautiful fall leaves. Thus, the thought of turning it into firewood was quite unappealing. After dropping it, I could see the wood was still beautiful. In fact it was 'spalted', a very specially condition of decomposition that makes the wood appearance very interesting, but still solid. So I added it to the log pile going to Ottawa!  Stay tuned, as in the next posting I will show how it turned into an integral part of Due North!

Now the logs had to be cut into posts, beams and boards, ranging in size from 10x10" for posts, 5x10" for beams, and varieties of 1" x whatever" boards for floors and walls. This was all accomplished by my friend Andre, who brought his portable band saw to our Due North site. This was a lot of work, as I had to carry and stack and/or sticker every board and beam.  I don't like to remember doing all that intense physical labour, but it happened -- and never again for me. Actually I could never do it again, as this was about 11 or 12 years ago.

In the next posting, I will describe the outcome of all of this sawing, and where it all ended up in our house. This was clearly the most difficult and dangerous of my various projects. After it was over, my logger at the cottage said he would never have harvested the blow-down of big microburst trees, because it is too dangerous, as the behaviour of the tree and stump when sawing is unpredictable. Happily it is over and I survived with only minor injuries!