Blowin' In The Wind

 Do you remember this house?  This was the Extreme Makeover House that was built in one week. This week, our hurricane force winds toppled two trees onto it.

 Our neighbors, the Park and the Carbiener families had a whole forest come down on them. Park's lost about six big trees and Carbiener's lost about ten big trees. Several landed on their homes causing big damage.

 The Anderson's new car was buried by their blue spruce.

 Many of the trees fell on power lines, killing the power. Bountiful City said every home in Bountiful lost power. Some, like Shon lost power for four days when trees took out their power lines.

 You know the wind is strong when it blows stoplights off their poles. I wonder what you can see from that webcam.

 This used to be a stately pine tree at the Lemmon's. We gathered up the tree trunk and took it to Heather's house for firewood. Heather's car window was smashed by falling debris.

 One of our neighbors described his street as a war zone. That was before the Toland's roof blew off and seven other trees fell on his short street. The Schnebly family was out of town. Won't they be surprised when they find their shed in a different place.

 Our friends, the Gerbers, lost their pine trees in the front yard. Who knows what they lost in the back yard.

 Samuelson's were awakened by the crash of a big pine on their roof.

 So may trees came down here, that even after they were cleaned up, the road was mostly blocked.

 While I was helping the Stats family with their tree, we watched as the Groberg's tree came crashing down blocking all of 400 East.

 The saddest thing was what happened at the cemetery.

 Big trees that were a hundred years old or more were uprooted, smashing some grave markers and dislodging others.

 So sad!

 When I first moved to Bountiful, I walked past the cemetery every day on my way to South Davis Junior High. I had never seen wind blow like it did here, but I could always count on shelter behind the cemetery's big pines.

 The snow drifted everywhere - but behind the big trees. Now they are all gone

 Here is a Chopper 5 picture of a job I had bid on in Farmington. Now I am glad I didn't get that job. I wonder if the general contractor makes all the subcontractors pay for the damage themselves.

 On Sunday, they let us out of church early, even though it was Stake Conference and we had visiting general authorities, to go help our neighbors clean up. One of the places we hauled storm debris was to a temporary "dump" at Bountiful High School. Look closely. That is my truck at the bottom of the picture.

Private companies helped by providing heavy equipment to help. We had about 250 people helping from our ward. This was repeated all over Davis County. Our bishop said this was a week he would never forget. We had work crews out within an hour of the start of the damage cutting down trees, running temporary power to homes and fixing roofs. The storm came Thursday morning and by Sunday afternoon, the cleanup which Bountiful City estimated would cost the city 20 million dollars had largely been accomplished by ordinary citizens with pickup trucks, and home trailers. Oh, the lines to get to the dump!

We learned a lot of lessons from this experience that will help us in case this ever happens again. We were fortunate that we still had natural gas and phone service. I hate to think what things would be like if we had the big one and lost access to those utilities. It was kind of nice to have a nice hot (albeit, dark) shower after a long cold day cutting up trees and running power lines.