Logger or Blogger

Logger or Blogger

(Tackling Tennessee Storm Damages)

written by: Tess Recer

    Tennessee has been hit with our classic summer storms the last few weeks. Clarksville specifically has had to endure back to back storms knocking out power and putting a damper on summer swim times. At one point, 13,000 residents were without power. Fortunately, as of today the Clarksville Department of Electricity is reporting that all resident's power has been restored. Let me just take a quick second to thank CDE! You guys are rockstars! As my family and I roamed the town avoiding our sweltering, powerless house Friday night, we could see downed trees laying across power lines and electric workers diligently working. We chose to wait out the darkness while indulging in our favorite pizza spot, Woody’s. Our power was restored about five hours after the storm blew past. Saturday afternoon right as we loaded our kids in the car preparing for a hike at a local park, yet another storm blew in knocking over a massive 60 ft tree in our yard. (Size is just an estimate. We did not bust out the tape measure to verify)

    If you blinked, you would have missed this fast moving storm. One minute we are watching dark clouds and debris swirling past us and the next second, the sun comes out and birds were chirping like it was just another summer day. This time, the power was only out for a couple hours. It was an absolute blessing the tree missed every possible object in our yard (two picnic tables, a fire-pit and a newly purchased play-set).

    So instead of a hike, we set off to Rural King to buy a chainsaw. Because why not? We definitely consider ourselves DIY'ers. 1 chainsaw, 1 hedge-trimmer, a gas can, some beef jerky and babydoll later (Rural King certainly has an eclectic selection of supplies) we were now well equipped to tackle the monster tree in our backyard.

    Sunday, Travis ate a hearty lunch and headed out with his new chainsaw to tackle disassembling the tree.  It took about four hours of slicing to chop up the entire tree.

    Thankfully, he made it through the whole tree without having to sharpen the blades. He called for my help after the tree looked like a loaf of sliced bread. I grabbed my gloves, bug spray and a smile and headed out to move the limbs to our newly formed wood pile. After fifteen minutes I was dripping sweat and was shocked at how slowly it was moving. It was then that I realized how truly massive this tree was!

    We moved the leafy branches to our burn pit. It was actually too much for the burn pit so I created a secondary pile next to the actual burn pit. We will wait for the leaves to die and then attempt to light them. We decided to cut a long piece to use as a bench on top of two other logs around the fire pit.

    We stacked the trunk pieces in the back of the yard between two trees. I’ve seen this done before although I have no idea the relevance of stacking them in between two trees? It looks professional in my book so I am proud of my stacking skills. Travis had to move the larger portions of the trunk because it was simply too heavy for me to move by myself.

    It was actually pretty fun to watch him lob off the last section of the trunk and the mud/grass flap attached to the root slam back down on the ground. I wish I had taken a video of it!

    Just as we were picking up the last of the leaf remnants, yet another storm blew in. And just as the other two times, the power was knocked out again. I feel like I could see the CDE workers dressed in raincoats standing by their doors rolling there eyes and sighing “here we go again”. After only a couple hours our power was restored and thankfully no more fallen trees were spotted by our house. I am sure we could have hired someone to take care of the fallen tree for us but we are the sort of folk that prefer to think we can do anything ourselves. In this case, we were right to feel that way!

    We opted for a med-high range powered saw. This was probably the best purchase even though we have no immediate plans to use it again. The tree was much larger than we realized and the wood much harder. We are guessing the tree is a Poplar although we are not a 100% on that. ***Please comment if you know. Rural King had many options for saws so ask your sales associate for help if you are not sure which one will work for the job you are doing.  (Notice the name of the saw "Wood Boss"!)