The latest good storm to blow through America seems to be Hurricane Ike. I live in Ohio. We don't really have a big hurricane season here but on September 14th Ike decided to tear ass through my town (not to mention the rest of everything to the everywhere of me) and cause some relatively substantial damage. There were sustained winds of 60-75 mph (for like 2 hours!) We got lucky and didn't lose power the whole time, but loads of people through region were without power for up to 2 weeks which is pretty crazy. Just now, a month and a half later, are the last of the tree limbs and debris getting totally picked up and cleared out. Here are some pictures from around my 'hood to show, to some extent, the damage. Click 'em to make 'em grow*. Sorry for some of the poor pictures, some were from a moving minivan and some were from a walk with the kids the next day. Apparently, if the stroller stopped for too long there was a non-motion alarm in the form of a screaming month old baby. Thus, some blurry pictures. I'll add my comments to some... Enjoy!

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This was about the first thing we saw when driving around at the very tail end of the wind storm.

This tree was one of the tallest Sycamores in the neighborhood. It got a haircut. There are several more pictures below.

Granted, this house was already boarded up before the storm, but the awning thing still hung properly.

That garbage can in the road is saying "road impassable."

 

What the garbage can speaks of...

The guy in the picture tells the garbage can "impassable shmimpassable."

 

 

Awe snap!

The tree stump in this picture may be the biggest diameter of the bunch, but it's got competition somewhere below.

The tree in this picture was really weird, now it's gone...

 

To the "Bumps" sign, wow! It just got sheared off at the ground!

There are power lines dangling about 6 feet over the ground, about 2 blocks from our house... I have no idea how we didn't lose power. And, I don't know about you, but the sight of power lines hanging like that is really pretty scary!

This row of pictures starts the next day on our walk. So, be prepared for some repeats and/or better/worse shots.

The picture here is what my view would be had only the wind blew harder in that direction.

 

There is an excellent chance that this is the biggest tree I saw to fall. It's really a huge mess of wood*.

A neighbors tree just snapped off at about 12 feet high, really strange...

 

 

That concludes your tour of a wind-stormed neighborhood in Podunk, Ohio. I'm surprised that I didn't see more (or any that I recall) actual damage to houses or vehicles, but it looked, to me, like our neighborhood went relatively unscathed!