Hurricane Charley Visited This Old New House

I'll attempt to give you a visual display of what we got for storm damage from Hurricane Charley. As usual, the thumbnails will open in a separate window for the full size picture. That way, this page will load fairly quickly, even on dialup, and you can choose to look or not look at any of the pictures you want to.

	This is how the front of the house looked before the storm. Technically, it's last year's picture; the shrubs in front have been taken out and replaced with lower and different plantings, all before the storm.		When I went outside Saturday morning (14 Aug) this is how the yard looked. There's not a square foot that doesn't have debris on it. All that green on the right of the picture is from the tree that fell on the roof.
	This is looking up the street. It really doesn't show in the picture how much junk was laying in the street. Frankly, compared to some streets ours was fairly clean.		Compare this to the first picture. That's a lot of foliage! All of it came from the two trunks on the right. The highest canopy visible is actually more trees in the background.
	This is a little more of an angle shot of the front corner. You can clearly see all the canopy on the roof and the large trunk hanging over that broke off the main tree.		From the rear corner you can see all of the canopies that came down. The third one didn't end up on the roof. It did take down the gutter on the back, however.
	A close up of two of the trunks. The one right in the middle is probably 12-14" in diameter. Duck soup for the new Husqvarna!		The roof after the cleanup was done. The Husky leaf blower got a workout, too. The funky look to the roof shingles is interference lines due to the lines of the shingles and the pixels in the picture.
	This is a shot of our fort wall. Driveway to driveway (about 90') averaging over 6' tall. The city is estimating four to six weeks to get all the debris picked up. I expect some brown lawn in the front for a while afterwards.		Only one penetration of the roof skin, although there is a bit of bruising here and there. This hole is about 6-8" in diameter. Fortunately, it's at or beyond the wall below, so whatever water has gotten in isn't going to hurt anything. It's now covered with roofing paper until the adjuster tells me how much he's going to give me. I figure they owe me a lot since I saved them at least $1500 (actual quote) by getting the debris down myself.

As I mentioned elsewhere, in my neighborhood (some 550 homes) there's not a yard that doesn't have a good sized pile of debris in it. Ormond Beach has a lot of wooded area; developers aren't permitted to come in and clear cut; so most neighborhoods look much the same as far as road pickup is concerned.

The pictures from Charlotte County (Port Charlotte, Punta Gorda) will look a whole lot worse, I imagine.

All in all, we were pretty lucky, and I got a new tool!

Last updated: 06 February 2009