Spared

In case anyone cares, Hurricane Idalia came and went and did nearly nothing in my county. God was kind.

It was an interesting few days.

Even though I am in an area which has never experienced a true hurricane, we do get winds high enough to make a real mess. They don’t push houses over or throw cars around, but they can down enough trees to result in a cleanup effort that lasts months. Also, because I lived and owned houses in Miami, where hurricanes hit with their full force, I am conditioned to stress myself while observing the progress of storms. I know what it is to go days without running water and weeks without power.

If you own commercial property, or you own a home that’s part of a bigger common structure, hurricanes aren’t much of a problem for you. It’s hard for winds to damage warehouses and condos. A house is another story. Houses are built and landscaped stupidly, as though daring hurricanes to come through and ruin people’s lives.

It wasn’t until surprisingly recently that Florida had quasi-intelligent building codes for houses, and it still hasn’t caught up with regard to landscaping. You can build a house with 100-foot-tall trees 5 feet from the eaves, and no one will bat an eye.

Should the government be involved in telling you what kind of trees you can have, at your own risk? No, but people should be using common sense without the government’s involvement.

The house I live in now had a 40-foot maple tree about 15 feet from the garage when I moved in. Lightning killed it soon after I arrived, but I probably would have left it in place had it not been destroyed by nature. I should have planned to get rid of it as soon as I saw it.

I still have some big, feeble trees within falling distance of my house and shop. I’m considering hiring a company to come in and knock them all over so I can move them. They’re going to fall on their own sooner or later, with or without hurricanes, so I might as well get ahead of them. For $4500, I can get a whole day of work from a crew with some pretty impressive machinery.

The guy who built this house did some surprisingly stupid things. I guess the trees I have to get rid of now looked neat when they were smaller and stronger, and his wife probably insisted on leaving them where they were.

I’ve learned some things about tree removal. First, never pay a tree service. Tree services use wimpy tools to peck at large problems. A couple of outdoorsy-looking ladies who run a local service tried to charge me $800 to fell one oak without bucking or removing it. This would have been a 10-minute job. If I had to pay them to fell the other trees I don’t like, I suppose I would be looking at a $10,000 bill. That’s ridiculous. For $4500, I can get 8 hours of tree destruction, along with all sorts of trimming, ground grooming, and rock removal.

The $800 tree ended up costing me $0 to move. It was a tall oak that had broken about 30 feet up. The top part of of it got caught in another tree, so the top was resting horizontally on the other tree, waiting to fall on me if I cut the trunk.

I took a fishing pole and cast a weight over the horizontal part. I used the line to pull a heavier line over the tree. Eventually, I had a tow strap and a chain attached to the tree, and I attached it to the tractor and yanked the tree down. Zero risk of injury and equipment damage. I used a chainsaw to get rid of the stump and waste wood, and that was that.

I like paying other people to do certain types of jobs, but if you’re going to yank my chain with an $800 bid for a job that will take you 10 minutes, I’m going to get creative and send you home with nothing. If these ladies had offered to do it for $250, they would have gotten my business, and I would have called them for all my future work. As it is, they will have to find comfort in the hollow victory of refusing to get realistic with their rosy pricing schedule.

I’m considering buying an excavator. I can get a decent one for $30,000. I wouldn’t buy a new one, because buying new equipment is stupid for amateurs and most professionals. An excavator would allow me to push most problem trees over, and I could also move trunks with it. I could remove all the annoying boulders in the yard and sell them for landscaping. I could pull stumps out quickly and easily. I could fix problems with soil distribution. I could build and repair berms and do light grading.

Biden and BRICS are probably going to destroy the dollar, so putting $30,000 into a machine that depreciates at a glacial pace is smarter than keeping the money in the bank. And who knows? I might even be able to make some money with an excavator if I had to.

I’ve pretty much decided that small landowners who don’t grow crops need two machines: a track loader, often misgendered as a skid steer, and a small excavator. A skid steer is a track loader with wheels. It’s not as good. It tears up the ground, for one thing.

A track loader can do everything a tractor can do except for farming, which I don’t do, and it does everything much, much better. It can lift at least twice as much for the same size machine. It can run bigger attachments. It can rip out stumps a tractor can’t budge. It can lift huge loads when rigged with a fork.

A track loader comes with a cage that protects the operator. A tractor will let things fall on you and kill you.

Track loaders cost more than tractors, but you get what you pay for.

I don’t need a track loader nearly as much as I need an excavator. The tractor, for all its shortcomings, does a whole lot of things reasonably well, and I improved it a lot by modifying it. If I can move soil, tear out stumps and rocks, and remove most trees with an excavator, it will be worth its weight in gold.

I’m always thinking of adding a building to hold stuff I don’t want to park in the rain. Problem: trees and rocks are in the way. With an excavator, I could clear the land myself, pretty easily.

As for Idalia, it made a big mess up the coast. I looked at videos of buildings besieged by storm surge, and it was disheartening.

The brutal truth is that most people who got flooded asked for it. It’s possible to build things on concrete stilts or raised mounds of fill, and people don’t do it, even though the cost of flooding is much greater than the cost of building correctly.

News stations always try to terrify us with claims that 12-foot storm surges are on the way. They’re not telling the whole truth.

First of all, the first three or four feet of surge only get the water up to the level of the ground in most of Florida, so those feet don’t count. Second, the worst storm surge I ever heard of in real life occurred during Andrew, and it was around 8 feet. This is a big deal if you’re right by the water and you built stupidly, but if you’re inland or you built correctly, it’s not a major problem.

If you go watch surge videos, you’ll generally see water coming up one to two feet on the sides of buildings very close to the water. Very bad, but not what the news nuts predicted. To listen to them, you would think houses were going to sink in up to their eaves. Real castastrophic, house-high storm surge is pretty unusual. You can find videos of it hitting places like the Bahamas, and it’s totally different from typical mainland Florida storm surge.

What they want you to think storm surge is like:

What it’s really like most of the time:

If you go on the web, you will see ridiculous stories claiming Katrina produced 28 feet of storm surge. Actual highest recorded value: 11.4 feet. Momentary waves aren’t storm surge. Flash floods from rain aren’t storm surge. Storm surge is standing water with a height that changes gradually. If 28 feet of water had gone across Mobile, it would no longer exist.

To Florida people, hurricanes are a lot like skin cancer. Except for melanoma, skin cancers are about as dangerous as hangnails, and you can cure them yourself with a can of computer dust spray and a Q-tip, in about two minutes. Floridians don’t get upset about them, but Yankees who get tiny basal cell carcinomas cut out have the gall to call themselves cancer survivors. As for storm surge, people who aren’t from Florida wave their arms and become incontinent when it’s mentioned, but most of the time, for at least 99% of the state, it’s not that bad.

I’m about 90 feet above sea level, I’m not in a flood plain (I checked before buying), and I’m in a place hurricane-force winds can’t reach. If I get my trees fixed up, hurricanes will mean nearly nothing to me. They don’t mean a whole lot now.

It’s terrible to see that people in Florida’s internal corner got surge flooding, but this is something you have to expect when you build a certain way. It’s not merely possible; it’s certain to happen sooner or later. It doesn’t make any sense to complain as though you had been hit by a meteor. You knew it was coming when you decided not to elevate your building.

I’m glad the storm is over, because I didn’t need any more stress after a 30-hour-long trip from Singapore. The flights alone accounted for about 24 hours, and the seats were like bricks situated under vises. The bricks pulverized my tailbone, and the armrests squeezed my arms against me. I made the mistake of buying exit row seats, and apparently, the seat bottoms are even less forgiving than the ones in the other coach seats. I was in real pain a lot of the time. A seat you can live with for three hours may seem a lot different after 10.

I think I also had coronavirus, which added to the suffering. I didn’t have a fever, a runny nose, a sore throat, or loss of my sense of smell, but I had a generally crummy feeling accompanied by the speedy and continuous accumulation of disturbing things in my nostrils. My wife had congestion and some throat problems, so I think I probably caught some of it, too. I wouldn’t have suspected anything had she not been sick.

Watching a storm approach is always draining, and combined with my other problems, it made for several unpleasant days during which I could not fully let go and recover from the trip. It was a little perfect storm that was reluctant to let go. Now I’m finally unwinding.