The storm in Storm Lake

Normally we Cullens try to stay out of the news, but last week we made a little of it ourselves when a big thunderstorm ripped apart an ash tree in our front yard. Mary and I were pictured with the downed tree in last Friday’s Times Pilot. We weren’t alone; there was a lot of damage elsewhere in Storm Lake and around Buena Vista County. A house on Shoreway Road took a hit to its roof from a large tree nearby.

The storm, which hit in the wee hours of Wednesday, June 17, just missed crashing a tree into our house as well, barely missing our neighbors’ cars parked in their driveway. It had some heft. The tree trunk, which split off the main trunk of the ash, was about a foot and a half in diameter and about 75 feet tall.

I don’t know if the tree was weakened by the emerald ash borer, which has laid waste to Storm Lake’s ash trees over the last decade, but the damage pretty much took the life out of the tree, which was probably more than 70 years old. We had been treating the tree over several years to prevent the deadly beetle from infecting it, and from outer appearances it looked good. Branches were full of nice green leaves and it showed no ill effects — until Mother Nature took it to the woodshed with winds gusting up to 70 miles per hour. (In Marshalltown winds hit 94 mph.)

I slept right through it. Mary heard the whoosh of the tree falling down but thought it was just the wind blowing. We didn’t realize what had happened until morning, when I looked out the bedroom window and all I could see were leaves brushing up against the house.

The tree limb completely blocked the sidewalk, so I called City Hall at 8 a.m. and within a half hour a four-man public works crew appeared with an aerial bucket truck, dump truck and loader with a giant claw. They dispatched the mess in short order. They pulled they tree on to Cayuga Street, where they cut it up and loaded the logs into a dump truck, then raked the big sticks from our yard and by 9:15 a.m. they were off to their next rescue call.

The fate of the remaining ash tree is uncertain. It will probably be taken down over the winter by the city, since it’s on the parking between the street and sidewalk. A smaller ash tree about 50 feet away will likely meet the same fate, since it has looked sickly since suffering in an ice storm several years ago. Like its mate, this younger tree — it’s about 45 years old — will probably also go to that big wood chipper in the sky.

We also need to figure out if we need to do anything with the big maple in our front yard. We don’t need that in our living room. We’ll consult with some tree experts to figure out what to do. Maybe it just needs a hair cut.

About 15 years ago during a spring blizzard a dead tree in a neighbor’s yard fell down across our back yard and pulled the power lines down that stretched from the alley to our house. Fortunately this tree also just missed the back of our house by inches, brushing up against a porch we had just built. Our insurance coverage put us up at King’s Pointe for two days while Mid-American Energy and Stanton Electric got us powered back up.

Iowa weather is never dull.