I think the strongest winds since we’ve been in the Pacific NW. Some gusts to 60 mph.
I’d thought maybe they wouldn’t happen—because it had started to rain, and I thought the front might have piffled. But then…
We got a weather warning on telly, and I decided to head out in muffies and night-robe to bring in the gulls sculpture and the little Chinese bridge thingie, and then realized the patio furniture needed to be rearranged. By the time I got inside, somewhat soppy soaked about the edges, the wind had started to blow.
It blew over Jane’s beloved yard swing—again. We’re going to have to put in some new canopy support rods. But this time it blew the very heavy swing seat completely to the street, right up by the curb. I saw it, and Jane and I in robes and muffies went out into the dark and the storm to gather up the swing seat and carry it (with one argument with a rosebush and some bloodshed) along the somewhat obstructed path to the side of the house, where it sits.
The big green trashcan blew over, and lies there this morning. We’re going to need to go out and pick up the swing frame and set it to rights. We think it blew over because of the oscillations of the heavy swing seat, but I’m planning how I can secure those swing frame feet to the ground, maybe tying them to four big rocks, or driving in modern tent stakes, which in this stony soil will take more mallet than we own, or going so far as to try to drive 4 pieces of rebar down into the soil. I think modern grippy tent pegs might be the sanest solution.
OSG can probably recommend some kind of rock screw that you could lash a cable onto to keep things in place.
We lost a limb out of a mature birch this summer and the camvas canapy to our gazebo was shredded with 70 MPH winters this summer, not once but twice. Before spring I plan on sewing additional velcro along the edges where the canopy “joins” to the frame, and punchin in grommets to tie it into place.
It’s been a year for severe storms. Climate change, ya think?
I agree, you should be able to find corkscrews for tethering at Lowe’s or ground tethers for dogs at a pet store. They’re very easy to install if you use a long enough lever for your T handle to screw them in. Also, 82Eridani, you might have better luck if you let the canopy surrender completely to the wind before it reaches shredder mode. You could reinforce the peak and attach a tether there that would run down low on a downwind leg and when the wind blows hard enough the canopy would streamline like a squid on the ground with relatively balanced forces on the radials and edges and likely slightly lesser wind velocity. When it is stretched on the frame, you’ve got constantly varying lift, drag and resonant frequencies affecting different sections of the canopy and it’s no wonder that in a high wind those random forces can come directly into opposition with enough force to cause seams or the fabric to fail.
Well, it’s certainly La Nina, which always hits this area with wet, and one supposes, wind.
And now that you mention it, until we can get some vines grown to hold this swing structure, I wonder about those screw-in-the-ground dog tethers. A couple of those could do it, one at the front left, one at the rear right! Our storms are pretty consistent when it comes to a blow.
If you DEFINITELY never want to move that swing from its chosen location, you could go the permanent route and set the feet in concrete.
There is that!
Glad to hear you are okay. So far I’ve only seen one downed tree here on campus (unfortunately on our neighbor’s roof), but there are a lot of branches. At least we’re getting the precipitation we need.
The dog screws sound like the best solution. Was the swing damaged?
Nothing we can’t fix with 20.00 worth of aluminum tubing and a can of Rustoleum. 🙁 Bent the canopy support struts.
Oh dear! But glad it can be fixed.
We get gales here in the NE of England during the winter. There’s nothing quite like bicycling home from the university with a 50 mph headwind.
Yep, I know that headwind! I grew up in Oklahoma, where the wind is nearly constant, and where a windstorm is pretty violent. Here in the Pacific NW, a 40 mph wind is serious, because the tall evergreens are fragile, and get pushed over, particularly if it’s been raining and the ground is wet—trees fall on houses, on cars, across streets, take down power lines…I saw one poor guy on the news who’d lost a whole evergreen grove: the big tree went down and pried up all the little trees around it when its rootball tilted.
Down in Oklahoma, any fragile tree is done for early, and only the tough ones survive to become really big, so you rarely hear of a tree going down. Limbs, however, do break off. Cottonwood is bad about that.
In my sojourns in the UK (all in summer) I never recall meeting much wind, but I’ll bet winter storms can be spectacular.
Places with chidren’s swing sets sell anchor sets like the dog screws but with chains. They don’t work that well in hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, but they will probably hold better up there.
Great! Thanks!
Thanks, Brennan, for the suggestion. I have the winter to mull this over. The other issue is the the awning becoming a big (unintentional) rain barrel. I think more grommets just for airflow and rain goes-outta will help.
Was in metro DC Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights on business. Wind storms took down trees while I was there and played merry heck with traffic, gusts into the 50s. Where I live in Arizona, we typically see at least two or three storms a year that could be considered microbursts with wind speeds in the 60s.