My tree fell down!
 

This is like Natapelia's story about her roof. A couple of hours ago, while I was sitting here in the basement reading this forum, a huge branch of the maple tree by my house fell. I heard it crack and fall!

The whole front yard is covered with it. Part of the branch is laying on our porch roof and there is some damage to the porch.

I love this tree! It shades the front and side of our house. It's a red maple and is so beautiful in the fall. We keep it fed and watered and pruned. I just had the tree checked last year and it's very healthy. I don't know what made the branch fall like that!

Fortunately, the rest of the tree looks ok. But there's a big empty space where the branch was.

We're the talk of the neighborhood. Everyone is coming by and looking at it.

Glad no one was hurt. I have some rather large trees in the greenbelt area behind my house. Some of them are dead. During the windstorms we get around here in the winters, I can hear them creaking and see them waving back and forth. Several have already fallen and taken out big sections of the chainlink fence. I'm sure they'd do some significant damage to my house if they hit it. Luckily the winds are in my favour and most of the times the trees fall into the greenbelt or impact an open area.

Here's what happened at my house in May. During a windstorm, the top of one of our pines split off and rotated 135 degrees on the way down. I was at work, but my wife watched part of it from our sliding glass door. Needless to say, she ran when she saw it coming towards her! As you can see from the picture, we were darn lucky that it didn't hit the slider or any of the nearby windows or the roof. After removing the tree, the only damage is a small indentation where the tree hit. We just need to paint over it. We consider ourselves very fortunate!

Get a gun and shot the squirrels

Geeze..ya never know, eh? That's damn close slotibartfast!

Check it out..finally downloaded the pics from my cam to the computer. Before we started moving our stuff after that storm we went up the stairs in the taller building next to us and took pics. There are tree limbs on the balcony, the windchimes and plants got blown all over, but those two chairs DID NOT MOVE!! Man we were lucky. I saw much worse.

Natophelia, those storms in Memphis made our local news about a week after they happened. That looks pretty scary.

Chuvak, are you saying my squirrels are getting to fat from all the sunflower seeds I feed them and they pulled the branch down?

Our insurance may pay for the damage to the tree and will definitely pay for the damage to the porch and the gutters.

My partner had just walked out the garage door to clean the gutters. He heard it cracking and went back into the garage.

We have lots of old trees in this neighborhood that no one ever cares for. I kept expecting them to come down instead.

Kathi