Yesterday while I was eating breakfast it started getting really dark and the winds suddenly picked up. I knew we would have trees and power lines down so I quickly changed from shorts to long pants and my fire shirt while stuffing my breakfast down. I didn?t even finish when the first call came in so. I was getting in my truck ant the wind was blowing sideways. I got my brush truck and started clearing trees from my area. It was so bad that my chief had to set up an incident command. The radio was going non stop until 11:30 AM and then the calls slowed down. At one point, while i was several miles away, I realized that there were a lot of calls on the dirt road next to my property. Power was out in the whole northern part of the county and there is no cell service so there was no way of call home or even have dispatch call my house. When I got home I was immediately told that we were hit, all of the lived in houses were in tact as well as the barns but all the hives were strewn apart. Several trees were snapped or up rooted lots of fences damaged. One unoccupied house is severely damaged with large branches on the roof. A wood working shop was destroyed.
We still don?t have power, I?m on generator and the internet just came up.
Right after I got home Judy, Oida, my sister in law and I put all of the hives back together as best as I could. Not sure I put all of boxes in the right place. I will have to check to see if any of them lost their queens or not. I will give them a few days to fix the mess before I inspect them.
The second one is after I put them back together.
The third one is a large cedar tree right next to my house, I suspect the winds twisted right over this tree to snap it like that. The house is just a few feet from where the top of the tree is. The fourth one is a tree on the work shop. It is a total loss.
I have to get to work. More photos to come.