Ernesto damage in pics

I was reading the local blogs late last night and saw a few pictures and accounts in National Joe-A-Graphic. I commented that there was quite a bit of tree damage at the apartment complex where I reside, here’s some of the evidence I took this morning. I’ve not cropped the photos, so some viewers may see a strange format, these are about 100 pixels wider than I normally post. My next post will likely push this one down to where the links are readable again for those of you with a 1024 x 768 format like I have on my monitor.

This tree is fairly close to my apartment, luckily the one closest right outside my bedroom window survived basically unscathed.

If you look out my window it looks like half the tree is gone and it’s a lot less full. I’m thinking this one’s pretty much a goner, like the one below.

A few yards down the way, this tree is certainly future firewood. There was another similar tree not far from it that blew down earlier this summer in a storm. I’m not sure if the trees here were diseased or what, but the little courtyard in front of my apartment has lost two trees I can think of since I’ve moved in and these would be three, four, and five (below).

Luckily the wind was pretty much from the east, a southeast wind would have knocked the tree over onto the transformer box. A west wind would have blown it over into the adjacent building.

Here’s the tree removal crew already hard at work. Apparently they’ve been here since very early this morning, and they’ve already cleaned up and moved some of the downed limbs, which are the subsequent photos.

It wasn’t just trees that took the brunt of damage. This built-in grill was a casualty when a tree fell on it. Below that is are pictures of the apartment’s outdoor pool area.

I feel sorry for the foreign girl who’s the lifeguard at our pool, it looks like she’s going to lose those last three days of work before she returns to Slovakia later this month. I’m not sure this all can be cleaned up before Monday, which was the last day the poll was supposed to be open anyway. Hopefully they will be able to salvage Monday and open the pool one last time for the season.

I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to stand there and take that picture. There have been a couple occasions where that spot as well as the dumpster pictured were ankle-deep in water. I spoke to our complex manager and apparently late last night the dumpster was surrounded by water but it’s since receded to the level you see. It’s fortunate that August was a quite dry month and thus the pond was pretty low. She also related to me that we’d had a couple residents’ cars damaged by falling trees and one minor incident with a building suffering the same fate.

Just before going to bed at 2 a.m. I was watching the Weather Channel for a final check and they showed Salisbury had 6.18″ of rain for September, obviously that was just for yesterday at the airport. I don’t think it was as bad as the June flooding rainwise but the heavy winds were the real culprit yesterday, all that rain saturating the trees and ground didn’t help.

I’ll have to get out later this afternoon and see the area that was shown in the picture on National-Joe-A-Graphic, the house I’m in the process of buying is near the one on that street (Potomac).