After the ice melted

I'm finally getting around to posting some pictures taken of the tree destruction, after the ice melted. These are mostly in our pasture, and typical of scenes thruout the county. There is so much work to do just on our land here at our house, it will take years to get it cleaned up. There's no way we can do anything on our bigger piece of property, other than just what it takes to clear the logging road that goes thru it.

This is one of our fences that got crushed. There are probably more but we haven't checked them all yet.

This pine tree is actually on our neighbor's land, but it was so interesting I wanted to capture it. The ice just stripped most of the limbs off so it ended up looking much like the telephone pole in the foreground.

Here's a closeup of the pine tree where you can see all the limbs accumulated at the bottom.

Jan 30th, Removing the big limb from the roof

This is the big hickory limb that split off and landed on the roof. It doesn't look very damaging from this angle, taken from the front of the house.


From this side view you can see that the limb arcs over the house and the tip of it extends thru the eave and down the side of the house, just behind the ladder.

There was still a lot of ice on the roof at this point which made being on the roof much more dangerous than usual. Denis was shoveling off the ice while Keith Sullivan started sawing off the limb.

As you can see in this picture there is still a lot of snow and ice on the roof, but the guys were careful to step where it had been cleared off. Keith is working on getting off the base of the limb. There is a rope holding the limb taut and away from the house.

Wayne Miles had been on the roof but volunteered to go down below and be the one to pull on the rope to make the limb miss the house. I was really worried about our sunroom windows at this point. No offense guys, but 'stuff' happens.

And the limb comes safely down in this final shot. Yea!!!!

This is the piece of limb that protruded thru the eave. They pulled it out and patched the roof until we can get if professionally repaired. Thank goodness for great neighbors that are willing to help out in times of need.

Jan 28th, More tree damage in yard due to ice

This is the west side of the house. Note the icicles hanging on the tree limb. All the rain that fell and froze is what caused the problem. Just a small coating of ice would not have caused such extensive damage. Those icicles just put too much weight on the tree limbs and the power lines and down they came.

This end of the house is where we have some gutter damage which you can't see here but will be included in a later posting on the blog.

The ironic thing about this elm tree that was so ravaged and caused gutter damage is that it is right beside the new septic tank we had put in. All the guys wanted to cut the tree down but I insisted that it stay. Now it looks like it may have to come down anyway.

This is the road in front of our house. This oak tree lost a couple of big limbs that had to be pulled out of our road. Getting to the mailbox was a real problem the first few days. It took tractor work and chainsaw work to get it clear enough to drive on.

Our apple tree bit the dust with this ice damage. It wasn't very healthy and we were not really harvesting the apples, other than for the horses. We just never got into the maintenance required to produce good apples. Still, I hated to see it go because I really loved the smell of the blossoms in the spring time.

Jan 28th, Day 1, Damage to roof

On the night of Monday Jan 27th, an ice storm moved thru north central Arkansas, leaving a heavy coating of ice on everything. The next morning we lost power at 8:30am and it was not restored until 12 days later on Saturday Feb 7th, at 7:30pm.

We had minor damage to our house shown in the following four pictures.