Some of you remember the " how tall is this tree" thread .
this is that same tree
but after last nights 4 inches of rain and 50 m.p.h. winds



https://s15.postimg.cc/ng5pou52z/DSCN0229_1.jpg

that's scary. like kill a man scary.

i recently just moved to Tampa FL.

lots of beautiful old trees lining the streets of the South Tampa residential areas.

with heavy rainfall / high winds they make me nervous to drive under them.

--------------------------------------------

Should make it a heck of a lot easier to take a measurement now.

Is that your neighbor's tree you were hoping she would cut down? Did it hit her house? It looks like it is laying up against a home.

I have 2 of them that went down about 2 weeks ago. Been working on one of them. Sucker measure about 80 inches around at the root ball. Other one is somewhat smaller, but is hung up on other trees. Which always makes for "interesting" efforts to get it down on the ground where I can turn it into firewood.

Root ball of the big oak is about 12 feet high and left a hole about 12-14 feet across but only about 3 feet deep. Hoping that root ball will fall back into the hole when I finally get all that trunk cut away.

quote:

Originally posted by deepocean:
Is that your neighbor's tree you were hoping she would cut down? Did it hit her house? It looks like it is laying up against a home.

neighbor, kitty corner, not next door ( fannies)

thats only one of the 45ft.-40 ft. limbs

limb went through the roof of the garage,

they had some local guy w/ a bucket truck come and clean off a dozen limbs, last summer,
had they spent the extra for an arborist,
he would have taken that diseased limb as well

I had 3 big fuckers. 2 were on their way out and the end of their lives so I took them out. The third was a Magnolia and it was huge. In Texas we can get pretty strong and violent storms in the Spring. Seeing what that Magnolia could do to the house I killed it too. When it was time to replant I did the right thing and planted shade trees (Pistachios) that will never get taller than the house. I’ve got neighbors with massive trees that will one day end up going through their roofs. My take is the shading of your home a massive tree provides is not worth the risk in the case of high winds and bad storms. Neighbor across the street has an oak that I’ve seen rock side to side in one of our storms, and the trunk is massive. It’s a huge tree that I almost couldn’t believe seeing go left and right.

That's the one thing about a hurricane, every so many years the bad, diseased, old, broken trees get taken out, hauled off and we start over...

If those trees are still there in south tampa
they've survived quite a bit already...

Well...


How tall was it?

 
We just had a huge Palo Verde tree in the front yard blow over. I was on the front porch, went inside for an hour and when I came back out it was down. I suspect a dust devil vortex took it down, as it was not otherwise a very windy day and it had not rained in quite a while. The crown was about 50 ft. across. It broke off right at the root system, but there were not a lot of roots, either attached to the tree or in the ground. Wife wanted to keep the main trunk and big branches intact as a "monument", so the trimmers left us that. The trimmers cut off the trunk square right at the bottom, and it exposed a hole in the trunk. The base of the trunk was about 2 ft in diameter.
 
Later, when I was moving the "monument" into place with my tractor, it rolled over and split in half, revealing a large cavity. Since the roots were basically history, it seems to be the work of the Palo Verde beetle. The adult looks like huge cockroach, but with wings. The grubs are laid near the base of the tree so they can feed on the roots. We saw some grubs when we cleared it, and shortly thereafter we were inundated with adult beetles coming from that area. The Curved Billed Thrashers made short work of them, pecking at them for 10-15 minutes until they were dead, then hauled them off for dinner.
 

I had one. You could see the splitting happening. I am very nostalgic, hatred to cut the big old tree down that had seen children on a tire swing and such in is life. But it had to go. It made the yard look bigger and gave Sun to the rest of the yard.
Just as all life. There's a beginning and an end :/

when they got the giant limb removed