SEP-B-3
DERWOOD DEVASTATION
AND A DC AND GWU SHUTDOWN BY HURRICANE ISABEL,
WHICH WILL BE THE OCCASION FOR MORE EXPENSIVE
TREE REMOVAL AND FURTHER DELAYS IN THE
DERWOOD CONSTRUCTION SCHEDULE,
SET FOR THE BRICKLAYING
THE DAY AFTER A LONG AND STORMY NIGHT
Derwood “Demo” was nearing completion. Now, add to that, “Devastation.”
When I returned via IAD and Craig Schaefer dropped me at Derwood to pick up the Bronco, we saw that the foundations had been dug along the side of the house, and the rear where the additions will be, and the heavy mature (fifty year –old “cured” cement) back stoop had been blown away with its reinforcement rods still stuck out from what was the side kitchen door, now suspended in air. The back was also excavated with a lot of mud dug out, and the whole of it had footings poured of reinforced concrete for the foundations. The inside of the “cave” did not look too different, since the bathtubs in the upstairs bathrooms were still in place, although most every other fixture had been chipped away with the floor joists exposed showing the rooms below absent the ceiling and acoustical tile which had been stripped earlier.
I got a call from Glenn, the project manager, on Thursday, saying he had a man in there doing the last of the demolition of the upstairs bathrooms, and was counting on the delivery of the cement blocks and other heavy construction materials with the bricklayers scheduled to come in on Saturday and to put up the walls on a “fast-track development overlapping some of the subcontractors to be working in different parts simultaneously to keep on the ambitious schedule which would have the final walk through and check list done just before Christmas. The heavy cement blocks were delivered in the large trucks which chewed up the rain-soaked drive, even as the whole of DC was battening down hatches with plywood and sandbags everywhere.
BY A HURRICANE ON ITS WAY—
BUT FOR THE SECOND TIME THIS YEAR BY WEATHER,
THE FIRST BEING MY PROLONGED STAY-AT-HOME IN FEBRUARY
BECAUSE OF SERIOUS WINTER SNOWSTORMS
The single word which was sent out that “shut down the city” in an unprecedented prediction was that the storm would hit earlier and harder than anticipated, so the Metro system closed down, and the federal and city government followed suit.
I went in
to GWU on Thursday and had a very easy time in the commute, since there was
almost no traffic. Scott and Suze
Downing had arrived to visit Diane and to give a presentation on Sunday at
church, following a vacation on the Outer Banks Beaches with Diane at the time
that Craig and I were heading out to
When I got to GWU I found that the film I would be turning in would not be processed for at least a week, since all the AVS Department was closed, as was the University because of the rapidly approaching Hurricane Isabel. I quickly retrieved my mail and the messages, and dashed over to the library to get the five books I should have read and check them out for the now-enforced weather days off. I found the books had already been checked out, so I would neither be able to read them from the library nor write the papers due on Sunday from the readings. As I was at the electronic card catalog, the library closed and I was shucked out into the wind and rain, as the city was ominously dark, deserted and howling with wind gusts. I headed back up to Diane’s house where she was still at home with the grandkids, having packed up for the trip she was going to take out of DCA and for which I would plan to drop her off.
The storm hit in a howling fury on Thursday night. There was less rain than wind, and I knew that if the storm was hitting the newly planted trees around her townhouse (I could monitor the rain on the one skylight she has over the couch I was sleeping on) it would be doing serious damage in my “climax forest” at Derwood.
It
did. I got up to try to do my first run
on Friday morning in many weeks—with two marathons only four and five weeks
away—a bad preparation for endurance events.
I dropped Diane in DCA, and found it eerily quiet with a lot of roads
close to the
Then came the phone call I had been expecting and dreading, as I
tried to make my way toward Derwood.
Glenn Murrell left a message on my phone as I had been out running
through the tree limbs and serious tree crashes—two of them I had seen onto
parked cars—and the first words were “The house appears to be OK—but the tree
where the breakfast room would be that you had protected by having the big one
cut down last month sheared off at thirty feet from the crown, and fortunately
flew away from the house, knocking down other trees and the phone lines.” He went on to say that it is not just that
tree—which was the one closest to the house, but SIX big trees that had been
shorn in a swath through the woods, added to the four I had taken out in
July. My “Tricentennial Oak” along the
drive was literally picked up and fell over, landing
on the Bicentennial Tulip Poplar suspending it over the drive and it will have
to go. These trees were here when George
Washington was surveying around here and before he moved to his beloved
Now, the other news: A big tree fell in back, with the crown just reaching the shed, the first thing built on the property, which appears to have survived for another try at another half century. But in coming down, it knocked out at least three or four others, and they blocked the derive as it circles around in back, where he was trying to deliver the cement mixers and the other materials for the overtime weekend subcontractors who will be doing the bricklaying. They cleared a path for at least some of the trucks to get back there but it looks like there will be a weather delay, and he has drawn up a new schedule to try to keep within the framework of the prior schedule—this now shows a “walk through” after nearly all the closure work by December 31, with whatever it takes thereafter for the interior designers to finish.
MY SAD WALKABOUT IN DERWOOD WOODS,
MUCH OF IT NO LONGER STANDING
As I drove down Kipling Road in a pelting rain, the first thing I see is one of my big trees along the margin of the property to the left of the driveway that borders on Art and Anita Rubin has shorn off and the heavy branches fell on their front lawn, missing both of their parked cars by inches. To the right were Ed and Debbie Lubers, who were in the yard and eager to see me, as they were finishing their own cleanup, I having been a part sponsor of Ernie Shifflett’s clearance of the huge limb of my tree that fell in their backyard missing all but the corner of their deck on July 3. Last night, they said that big trees were bending almost horizontally in my woods, and they could hear them popping and crashing. They thought of evacuating, but then were afraid to do so, so they got the kids up and brought them all downstairs to the basement. That is when Ed said he heard what seemed to him to be a “Microburst” like a tornado churning right down through the center of my woods, and he could count out up to five or six big trees crashing. I found them.
My biggest oak is now history. It was soft on one side, but alive (I had the four dead trees removed in July by Ernie Shifflett) but we agreed then that this monarch of over three hundred years might outlast us and maybe our grandchildren unless there were just such an event as happened last night. The only time I had witnessed a severe storm that chopped through my woods was when my Dad was visiting about twenty five years ago and the big tree just on the outside of the drive as it curved around the rhododendrons and azaleas popped at its “masthead” with a full head of “sail” and it “crowned” blowing away through the woods mowing down big trees in front of it like a lawnmower, leaving a thirty foot stump behind.
That is
just what happened to the magnificent tree that was the one we had protected by
removing the dead taller tree that had dropped branches onto it. One of the dead branches was hung up in the
crotch of the live tree, which is about four feet around at the base, and that
plans for the breakfast room included sparing this tree, straight and tall to
shade it over the built-in skylights of the new addition and the deck. Ironically, the dead branch was still hanging
in the crotch of this tree when I returned from India with the four dead trees
removed and all their wood carted away in a burst of activity by Ernie
Shiffllett and his team the following day after I had left and before anyone
had started either demolition or construction.
Ed and Debbie Lubers reported two things about the crew that removed the
trees: first, they could not believe the size of the sky crane that filled the
whole downhill slope of the end of
I saw that the basketball backboard was lying on the ground. Then I saw the house. The wooden fence within the brick piers of the gate to the left of what would have been the kitchen door was crushed. The phone lines were taken out. Three smaller trees were mowed down, and the Weber grille that had been moved from the back stoop and the boat trailer which had NOT been were crushed.
When I walked around to the rear of the house where the footings and foundation are much messier with mud and the tree debris of branches and scattered leaves that I must always go around cleaning up on my return from nay trip that lasts more than a week, I saw the shed. I saw it over a thicket of top branches which were stacked against it. Some had been sawed off already to get the access for the heavy equipment to deliver the cement mixers and compressors as well as a load of sand for the mortar. When I looked closer, I saw a smooth gray shape under all the tree branches stuck up at a crazy angle. I could not remember having a beech tree or other grey smoothbark back there. Then, I recognized what it was—my canoe!
After all
the contentions about my canoe, here it is, resting on its wooden supports,
which gave way beneath it as it was pummeled into the ground by at least three
separate trees which seemed to zero in on it.
I walked back into the woods, and saw several more tree trunks at sharp
and shiny right angles. I mused to
myself that we are so powerful---we have thermonuclear weapons and giant
machines fed by enormous power grids. A
Grade Two Hurricane—even this far inland—has shown how puny this power is. A Grade Two Hurricane has more energy
released than al the thermonuclear weapons ever blown up and if harnessed, this energy could supply all of
My Derwood woods, so carefully pruned and plucked in preparation for the remodeling of the manse, is now a collection of matchsticks in the path of the storm. This will no doubt set back the schedule of events in the remodeling plan, already on a tight and dense schedule. It will also add a large front end expense—already compounding the earlier removal in advance of the dangerous dead trees—which may have, ironically, given many more degrees of freedom for the swaying of the live ones whipped back and forth in the fierce winds of this now-famous storm, until they “cracked the whip” snapping off at their crowns. But, the first thing to note is that there was no loss of life here, and no serious property destruction—roofs, vehicles, windows (every one of which is already programmed for replacement anyway! I have lost several things I had intended to keep—like a canoe, boat trailers, sheds, brick fence gates, and –not least of them—my Tricentennial Oaks.
As had happened on July 4th eve with the Lubers, several heavy branches of big trees—and in the Ruben’s case—two big trees in addition—fell from my property onto theirs, which makes them their liability, even if I feel bad about it. But, as on July 4, the only loss was the $1200 for the branch removal, and a little decking, and not the house or the kids in it. The Rubens’ front yard is dug up and a large amount of timber is piled on it—but their two vehicles are parked only a few feet away from ground zero of the first tree that fell toward Kipling Road, and the second was sheared off and fell away toward my woods without reaching my drive.
I called Wendy Rose and State Farm Insurance—but they, of course, are on an answering queue, with a distant agent taking the call for the report, saying that where she was it was sunny and b right, but they had been nonstop busy for the last 24 hours taking calls from the Hurricane Isabel pathway. I do not know what will be the next steps there, but it was not encouraging when Ed Lubers had called them in July to learn that the only thing that was covered was the edge of the deck, and there would be an upper limit of $500 for the total claim on that through the same State Farm policy.
Even harder
to reach was Ernie Shifflett. I had
shaken his hand and given him a large check in advance the day before my departure
and told him just to fix it in any way he knew a lot better than I how to proceed. Ernie is the
kind of fellow that a handshake is better than a contract, and I trusted him
implicitly as he did me when we met—both of us recognizing real world types
without a lot of guile and spin talk. So, I went away confident he would do the
job right, and according to Ed Lubers and Dale Kramer who watched and even
photographed the process, he did it right, as he promised he would. Dale had taken pictures I have not yet seen
of the process at that time when the dead trees where removed straight up by a
rented sky crane. Dale had been off bow
hunting elk at the time I had been in
So, I have
returned from the Tundra, thinking I had seen serious weather and vast
wilderness forces on the loose in Alaska, to find greater violence than a
charging 1400 pound bull moose plowing through swamp water and willow habitat
and somehow maneuvering his 70+ inch massive rack through the nearly
impenetrable thicket—to find that the power released in Derwood makes my tundra
trek look like a golf outing over a tundra putting green! I just received the first two rolls of the
on-line prints to get a pre-view of the Alaskan wildlife pictures to follow,
and when the city of
So, “A Moose is Loose” in the Yukon/Kwoskikwim Delta because of a strange concatenation of events that seem to have made this hunting trip a unique experience— and I arrive back in over-developed Montgomery County MD and hyperactive DC, to find they have both been shut down by natural and powerful events, just as were these all-powerful plenipotentiaries in February when I navigated around Derwood by snowshoes, which would have been far more likely footgear in the area from which I had just returned!