Well...just spent the entire day in Gloucester Virginia clearing five 200 foot, 80 year old pine tree's and assorted other small tree's and crap that ended up in my Father-in-Law's yard as a result of Hurricane Isabel...I've never worked so hard in my life and I now have stock in Advil...or rather there's a couple million milliliters of Advil stock in me.

I'll write something up later on the day's work but suffice it to say the two men I worked with (Lloyd and Howard) are two of the finest men I've ever had the pleasure of spending a hard-days work with. One over 70, the other just shy of that, spent the entire day using Stihl chainsaws and driving front-loaders and picking up literally tons of wood, branches, roots, and assorted flotsam and jetsam to include cutting down the tree that draped over the house (the one that caused all the damage)...the tree with the 9 foot in circumference had 85 plus rings and whose bark was an inch thick...one big-ass tree.

Here's some pics:

Seawall is destroyed...lost 20 foot of yard
Looking other way; That's part of the dock
More seawall...nice geologic layers there
Nothing but pilings left
The poles are what's left of a catamaran...we do not know where it is (the boat that is)
Pinewold...my Father-in-Laws house
The big-ass tree that snapped and fell to Earth
Standing where the tree was...it fell on the chimmny, crushed roof #1 and continued on
Here's the chimmny and displaced roof #1
The tree hit roof #1 on the right...fell over this alley...and crushed roof #2 to the left
The chimmny fell and crushed a few chairs and whacked the side of the house
Here's roof #2...the tree fell from the right...this is after cutting the remains of the tree down
Other angle (son Sam). Insurance will replace this roof (#2) and this wall

Posted by Wes on Friday, September 26, 2003 at 23:56 | Permalink