Author’s note
This diary is not meant to be representative of the derecho as a whole. It’s is just what happened to us and our homestead. If you are looking for overview, you might try:
www.dailykos.com/...
www.washingtonpost.com/...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/derecho-iowa-national-response_n_5f3b0c44c5b670ab17aecf7b
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/8/15/1969654/-On-Monday-Cedar-Rapids-Iowa-was-leveled-Thanks-for-your-lack-of-concern
https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/iowa-derecho-storm-cedar-rapids-linn-johnson-county-alliant-20200818
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2020/08/18/donald-trump-visit-storm-ravaged-iowa-tuesday-derecho-cedar-rapids/3385668001/
And of course, google is your friend. Well, not really, but that is a different discussion.
Background
Just to get readers oriented if they aren’t familiar with Iowa geography or news, here is a bit of background. We live in Cedar County, west of Tipton. Cedar County is east of Johnson county and Linn county, which are the two counties that news reports often say got the brunt of the derecho that hit on Monday, August tenth. Cedar county doesn’t often get mentioned, but then our population is so low in comparison, not many news media care.
I’ve not been to Cedar Rapids (Linn county), but the news reports are horrible. There have been reports from Cedar Rapids of winds of 112 mph. After seeing pictures, I believe that wind speed. I have been to Iowa City (Johnson county) and from a non-scientific survey, also known as driving around, Tipton (Cedar county) looks just as bad, if not worse than Iowa City.
From what I’ve read and seen, the damage done by the derecho to crops is variable and inconsistent. When I drive east towards Tipton, the crops look practically untouched. Not-Elizabeth reports downed crops north of us, but even then, it is inconsistent. One field will be flattened, the next field is just fine. A field may have major damage in a strip through the middle, but the edges are untouched.
On the internet, there are pictures on the web of grain bins destroyed by the derecho. I’ve seen others that are untouched.
The Derecho at Our Homestead
The damage done at our homestead was just as inconsistent as it was elsewhere. To start with the things that got spared, here is a picture of the canvas canopy we have by the beach at our pond. There is nothing special about this canvas canopy, it’s just like what you might see at a farmer’s market. The user’s manual specifically says not to leave it up permanently, or to use it during storms. We did both.
And even if this was a relatively strong canvas canopy when it was new, it was significantly weakened during a regretful hissy spat with a riding lawn mower (don’t ask). Two aluminum struts were broken and replaced with much weaker oak struts.
So what makes this canvas canopy noteworthy is that it lived through the derecho with nary a scratch or bent strut. Go figure.
Our house was spared as well. No damage at all. I was looking out the window (maybe not the smartest move) when the storm was at its worst and could see extreme winds in the tops of the trees, but the wind speed was much, much lower at ground level.
One explanation of this wind speed gradient is that there is a high ridge just to the north and west of our house. This siting was by design as the prevailing winds in a storm are from the northwest in this part of the country. It seems to have worked again. It also saved us from a tornado that went directly overhead fifteen or twenty years ago.
However, when you climb the hill to the trail on the ridge, thing change fairly dramatically.
The first thing you notice, is the snarl of tree remains shown in the following picture. Even when you are looking at them in person, it is not entirely evident what shard of a tree belongs with what other shard.
This snarl of trees is about 250 yards upwind of the canvas canopy discussed above. It is about 100 feet higher than that canvas canopy.
A snarl of broken trees
Below is another picture of the same area from a different viewpoint. Notice the nice straight oak tree in the foreground. It just doesn’t have a top. I have no clue as to whether the top was taken out by the wind or one of the other trees falling on it.
An oak with no top.
The slanted tree in the picture at the below is a cherry tree that I have been baby sitting for over forty years. It was damn near this tall when we bought the land, however, it was kinda’ spindly. It is hard to tell the scale from this picture, but it is now huge for a cherry. It just doesn’t have a top.
I’ll have to log it out or let it rot.
This area is part of the sugar bush, where I have been keeping the forest floor fairly clean to make it easier to walk around collecting maple sap. Not anymore.
A decapitated cherry
This hickory tree looks like a giant hand grabbed it by the top, twisted until the trunk split up the middle and then bent it over ninety degrees.
I have no idea what really happened.
A hickory twisted off.
I’m not going any farther down this trail. Notice the trunk of the tree off to the left and the top of the tree smack in the middle of the trail.
The new “end of the trail”
This is the butt of the tree in the previous picture. I can’t imagine the force necessary to break off a tree of that size and rip half of the root ball right out of the ground.
This is another tree that I have known for forty years.
Oh, my dog. The force this must have taken.
This is just a rough guess, but I think a lot of the trees that broke off are red oak. That could be because we have a lot of red oak. Or, maybe they are brittle.
This is just a random tree that’s broken off. There’s nothing special about this one. There are probably hundreds if not thousands like this on our eighty acres.
Random broken tree
While it is kinda’ sad to see a tree you’ve known for forty years destroyed, it is down right depressing to look off in the distance and see patches of blue sky all around where before all you could see is the underneath of the forest canopy.
All of these pictures were taken from a section of trail about one hundred and fifty yards long.
Here’s what I normally use to clean up the tops when I am cutting firewood. It is totally inadequate for the task at hand.
Whoever cleans up our trails will need a machine about an order of magnitude larger.
Compact tractor with grapple.
After the storm, we didn’t really appreciate the gravity of what we had been through. We looked out and didn’t seen much if any damage. We didn’t walk up to the ridge and therefore didn’t see all of the damage in the pictures.
Our first concern was to figure out how long the various grids that support our home would be out of service.
Considering how remote we are, you might think we are fairly self-sufficient. Well, there’s nothing like a derecho to dissuade you from that opinion.
Electric: we didn’t have phone service, so Monday evening, I drove east to find a cell signal to call our power provider, a Rural Electric Co-op (REC). From the sounds of their pre-recorded message on their phone, they went down hard. After that we were mentally prepared for a long electric outage.
Since our stove is electric, the Tuesday morning we set up for cooking on the grill. The only problem left was coffee. One has priorities. We got the camp stove from the sugar shack and found a French press. We were good to go.
After a leisurely break fast, we got the generator out and drop cords to reach the two freezers and one refrigerator. Maybe a bit too leisurely. While it didn’t melt, the ice cream did get a bit grainy. We’ve had to eat it before freezer burn takes over. Yes, eating ice cream may have been the worst of our sacrifices.
Then, amazingly, late on Tuesday, the power came back on. Yea, REC! Yea, co-ops!
Even though we are way out here in the boonies, we got electric service restored on the second day. There are still people in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids who still don’t have power at the time of this writing on the seventh day. This follows a pattern we’ve seen before, we have a fair number of outages, but the big ones are fixed relatively soon compared to investor owned power companies.
One of the ironies was that we have a large solar array, but couldn’t use it because it is grid synched and doesn’t work without the sixty cycle signal from the grid. Maybe I’ll buy a house battery and a controller that can generate that signal.
Water: We have our own well, but the pump obviously doesn’t work without electricity. Since the well is not on a transfer switch to accept generator power, I would have to remove the well wiring from the breaker box and add a plug to the wiring to fit the generator. However, we have a 200 gallon pressure tank and that amount of water lasted until grid power came back. We lucked out again.
Phone: Our phone service is cellular only. The signal for that disappeared for three days. The signal I found up the road disappeared. On the second day, I couldn’t even find a signal when I drove to town.
Internet: Since our internet is via cell frequencies, it came back when cell service came back.
Gasoline: One service that you might not think of as a “grid” is access to gasoline, but it basically is one in this sort of event. We have three stations in Tipton. The first went down because of “no power to the pumps”, even when there was power in the store. The second rapidly sold all of their gasoline and shut down their pumps, too. That left only one service station, which was connected to the local ag co-op. They had gas and apparently kept trucking it in to support the community. Yea co-ops!
One irritant was the long lines created by all of the people who just had to top off their tank, just in case. It would have been nice if one pump was reserved for users of generators, chain saws and other needs to respond to the derecho.
All in all, we humans on the homestead were pretty damn lucky.
The woods, not so much. However, the sunlight coming through gaps in the forest canopy will spur grow and the woods will recover. Not-Elizabeth and I may not be around to see it, but it will happen because the woods are protected by a conservation easement into purpetuity. Unless global warming wins. IanA
