Rensselaer Adventures

This blog reports events and interesting tidbits from Rensselaer, Indiana and the surrounding area.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Storm damage

We had quite a storm blow through last night. It knocked down a few trees and enough branches to keep city crews busy today. This tree near Weston Cemetery had a large poison ivy vine growing on it--I hope that the worker pays attention to what he is touching as he cuts up the tree. Like the other trees that I saw down, this tree had a lot of rot. It must have been home to many generations of carpenter ants.
This rotted tree on North Franklin Street also found the wind too much. It fell across Franklin, but had been cut apart to clear the street by early this morning. If you look closely, you can see a mulberry tree had been trying to grow up inside this old silver maple.
This tree that fell by College Ave was a bit smaller than the other two.
The most serious damage was north of town where a funnel cloud was sighted. It tore off a bit of the roof from Farm Bureau Insurance building, destroyed one of the entrance porches and damaged the other.
In the background you can see the new county building that last week we visited for an open house.
It had most of the gutter on the west side of the building ripped lose and tossed over the roof. It also looks like it lost a window back there, but it was fortunate not to have had more serious damage.
Below you can see most of the missing roof from the Farm Bureau Insurance.
Given the strength of the winds, I was surprised that there was not more damage.

Our storm damage made the evening news on WLFI last night. The previous night they had nice coverage of the 5th Annual Chloe K 5k Run/Rock/Ride for Autism Research.

2 comments:

Old WPUM Engineer said...

You're on WRTV 6 today.

Anonymous said...

You are more prolific than the paper with the photos. Thank you.