Old House Handyman: June storms yielded temporary power outages, but a tree forever gone

The old farmhouse and barn on a windswept hill in Holmes County have taken a beating during the century they have stood sentinel over the valley settled by my ancestors more than 200 years ago.

The buildings built by my great-great-grandfather stood firm again in June when a wicked wind ripped across Ohio. We give thanks for being spared, and our hearts go out to those who weren’t so fortunate — those who lost homes or other buildings, or power and all of their perishable food.

We lost power and trees at the family farm. These are facts of life in the country, and we are generally prepared for such events.

We have several chainsaws and two generators at the farm, and a third generator available for emergencies.

This turned into a bit of an emergency as temperatures soared and refrigerators at my dad’s house and my daughter’s nearby house were losing their cool. The problem was that the smaller of two generators was in the shop for a tune-up, and the big one responsible for keeping things cool and running the water pump for both houses was overheating and shutting down on a regular basis.

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We also host freezers used by our Amish neighbors. One of them brought a generator to keep the freezers cold and offered it to our daughter to run her fridge for a few hours each day.

In Day Two of three without power, given the generator issues at the farm, Dad made an urgent plea to the repair shop to get his little generator fixed in short order, which the repairman did. And I loaded up the generator I bought after the 2004 ice storm that left us without power for about a week of extreme low temperatures. Fortunately, I had done routine maintenance on the generator a few weeks earlier, and it worked great.

No good plan goes perfectly, however, and before we could use my generator, we had to adapt a power cord to fit the connection in dad’s garage.

After that experience, we know that we need to be even better prepared for future storms and loss of power, such as solving the overheating problem with the big, old generator and adding another large generator to the mix.

Even before the power issues were resolved, our Amish neighbors showed up with chainsaws to help cut up an old silver maple that wind had claimed during the storm. (Another neighbor across the valley has a home weather station and recorded wind gusts up to 90 mph.)

Dad estimates that the tree at the corner of the yard near the barn was in the neighborhood of 75 years old. It had grown like a weed behind a corn crib, which since has been moved to the neighbor’s farm. Half of the tree blew down in a storm a few years ago. The remaining half stood firm through many storms, but this one twisted it like a child playing with a blade of grass.

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The neighbors cut the tree into manageable sections and dragged them near the firewood pile that lines the fence between dad’s house and the pasture so that we could cut them into fireplace logs.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, we cut firewood and burned treetops.

The neighbor whose cows and horses graze in our pasture stopped by a few days later to admire our work and offer advice: “That’s a nice pile of firewood. You better put a fence around it, or the cows will knock it over. You stacked it once; you don’t want to stack it again.”

The fence went up 20 minutes later.

The yard and pasture are tidy again. But there’s a hole in the view from dad’s front porch where a leafy sentinel on the hill once stood.

Alan D. Miller is a former Dispatch editor who teaches journalism at Denison University and writes about old house repair and historic preservation based on personal experiences and questions from readers.

youroldhouse1@gmail.com

@youroldhouse

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Storms caused caused temporary issues but downed tree leaves a void