Summer Snowmageddon 2014 (split from Weather)

[CaptainYooh]

Originally Posted by Regulator75

I shook the crap out of the my nine trees this morning, just stood underneath and let the snow come crashing down on me. Good times.

I did the same. Freed up a few aspens and carragana bushes as much as I could. But our giant laurel leaf willow has all of its branches spread down on the ground like a dead octopus. There was nothing I could do to help it. Painful to watch.

[surferguy]

was thinking of tweeting Nenshi about home owners doing their own tree clean up. Instead of dumping everything at a landfill - neat piles of wood stacked up out front of your house would disappear quickly by neighbors with fire pits/fireplaces.

Can you guys help me spread the word?

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by surferguy

was thinking of tweeting Nenshi about home owners doing their own tree clean up. Instead of dumping everything at a landfill - neat piles of wood stacked up out front of your house would disappear quickly by neighbors with fire pits/fireplaces.

Can you guys help me spread the word?

Doesn't wood have to dry out for a while before it is nice for burning? I always thought wet wood = smokey fires.

[surferguy]

^^ true but smaller stuff will dry quick enough to use over the winter.

Ie - I cut/stack behind the garage and use it during the winter to heat the house.

A lot of the limbs that are down are only 2-6' in girth - that is a lot of useful wood to be just thrown in a landfill

[Ducay]

Originally Posted by Bunk

A pretty devastating impact on our trees. A sad day. The cold is annoying, but the loss of trees really bums me out.

Agreed, I'm a huge lover of big mature trees, and last night was their holocaust. Literally the perfect storm for devastation. This was a really big/wet dump even for our winters, but all these deciduous trees never stood a chance when their foliage is still there and still chalk full of water. Even 2 weeks later this storm wouldn't have been so bad as the leaves would have started to turn and would have shed rather than holding tight and taking the whole branch down with it.

I can hardly bear to look at the ravine I back onto because it is just bent over Aspen/Birch as far as the eye can see.

[AltaGuy]

Poplars in Hillhurst are getting decimated - will likely be the end of quite a few of them, if not most.

The amount of extra weight created by the leaves holding snow is what is particularly devastating - heard a guy on the radio say that the amount of snow a branch holds increases by 100% when leaves are still up.

[Ducay]

Worst part is that seems like most people don't replant nowadays when they lose a mature tree, which leads to sad looking streets and loss of property value for all.

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by Ducay

Worst part is that seems like most people don't replant nowadays when they lose a mature tree, which leads to sad looking streets and loss of property value for all.

Yeah, I hate that. You can pick up a crappy little tree for $20 if you want to be a total slacker and at least that will grow over time. But removing trees and replacing them with nothing blows me away.

[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by Ducay

Worst part is that seems like most people don't replant nowadays when they lose a mature tree, which leads to sad looking streets and loss of property value for all.

Yeah. Trees are already far too sparse in Calgary and the last thing this city needs is to lose any mass quantities of them.

[Muta]

I hope the trees suffer terribly.

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by Muta

I hope the trees suffer terribly.

huh?

[Freeway]

Basically any area in the west/northwest built around the 1970s or earlier has nice trees.

Well, they used to.

[surferguy]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

huh?

the Ents once flooded his castle. He has never forgiven them

[Mccree]

Originally Posted by surferguy

was thinking of tweeting Nenshi about home owners doing their own tree clean up. Instead of dumping everything at a landfill - neat piles of wood stacked up out front of your house would disappear quickly by neighbors with fire pits/fireplaces.

Can you guys help me spread the word?

I could be wrong but I think the City turns this stuff into mulch for use at city parks etc...

[surferguy]

Originally Posted by Mccree

I could be wrong but I think the City turns this stuff into mulch for use at city parks etc...

I do not doubt that but there will also be an overwhelming amount of limbs coming through the system as a result. Id bet a large amount of these limbs will be sent to the landfill.

[skudr248]

How are the trees holding up in Mckenzie Lake SE? When I left this morning at 6:45am didn't see anything down, but I was half asleep as well haha

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by Mccree

I could be wrong but I think the City turns this stuff into mulch for use at city parks etc...

I think you are correct, they do that with xmas trees.

[Northendzone]

had to laugh today as i ran an errard at lunch....behind my building there is a street flanked with a row of mature trees. someone, had placed several plyons along this street to presumably warn folks not to park there. of course, peole these days are lazy and a couple of wizards parked under these trees....they spun the wheel of fate and lost, as a large branch broke off of one of the trees. did not look like the cars had much damage unfortunately......

[Bunk]

Originally Posted by CaptainYooh

I did the same. Freed up a few aspens and carragana bushes as much as I could. But our giant laurel leaf willow has all of its branches spread down on the ground like a dead octopus. There was nothing I could do to help it. Painful to watch.

Yeah, used a golf ball retriever on the trees outside our place. Worked pretty well, hopefully it saved some branches.

[kevman]

On the tree topic I feel like the city has done a poor job of maintaining a healthy diverse canopy in it's mature communities. The street I live on has a boulevard that is almost completely bare of trees and this storm hasn't helped. The boulevard currently has numerous trees flagged and sprayed for removal because they have outlived their reasonable life span. They have been topped, pruned and topped again to the point they look like stumps with a bush of suckers growing out of them. In their place are tiny seedlings that are 50+ years away from becoming anything meaningful again . It's too bad that the city/community never had the foresight to plant new trees every 10 years or so instead of letting them all die at once.

Add the snow that has made quick work of all the Lilac's and filler bushes and my quaint little street in Sunnyside has an awfully suburban feel to it...

Back on topic - apart from the tree massacre I'm kind of a sucker for "extreme" weather so in that regards this is all pretty neat!