How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

#31

Post by spookthesunset » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:33 PM UTC

irrational wrote: post #25

forinti wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it why cities plant palms along streets: they offer little or no shade and they drop enormous leaves that can hurt people or damage cars.

I grew up in south Florida where all the streets were lined with palm trees. I never heard of a person or car being hurt/damaged by falling palm leaves. It has probably happened, but must be exceedingly rare. Then again, I never saw downed leaves along the roads or any city trucks doing pick up, so now I wonder how and when they were picked up.

Any time I visit areas with palm trees there seems to be a small army of gardeners that maintain all but the “wild” palm trees. Also pretty sure there is a cottage industry of people who harvest the coconuts.

Re: How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

#32

Post by dopamean » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:34 PM UTC

DelaneyM wrote: post #26

We have a dense line of palm trees protecting our shoreline on our property (South Caribbean), and ours is the only house on a long coast which hasn't lost metres of land to oceans over the past decade. (Our neighbours have prioritised private beaches, I like my farmland.) It's easily visible on Google Maps satellite view, but I'm not sure I want to post a link to my house... Because they're all that's holding the pr…

How is your land going to hold up as the neighbors' is eaten away?

Re: How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

#33

Post by OneLeggedCat » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:37 PM UTC

photochemsyn wrote: post #14

WalterBright wrote: post #11

Survivor bias. The ones that don't survive a hurricane don't grow up.

Another phrase for 'survivor bias' is evolution under natural selection.

Yeah he's not really using the term "survivor bias" in the way that statisticians do.

Re: How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

#34

Post by daniel-cussen » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 3:41 PM UTC

doubled112 wrote: post #12

TobTobXX wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To save you the lookup: 50 lbs = ~22.5 kg

Is it just Canadians near the U.S. border that constantly convert temperatures and weights on the fly? I see replies and bots all over the Internet for this, but I usually have it roughed out already.

Chilean-American here, absolutely. All the time. I still can barely do fahrenheit, and I've come to prefer the American system of feet and inches for human height.

Re: How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

#35

Post by smm11 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 4:13 PM UTC

I've got a palm on the border with my neighbor, and it's a tank.

And you might think dealing with tire-like leaves is a hassle, until you've lived somewhere surrounded by Oak trees and a neighborhood association that demands raking.

Re: How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

#36

Post by daniel-cussen » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 4:19 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #16

Amen to deep roots. I had to remove a tiny 5 inch diameter palm tree from my back yard and it took me about 2 hours of heavy pickaxing and the shoveling. And ultimately, I had to tie a rope on the tall end, and have my wife lever it from the root with the pickaxe. Extremely hard to remove these bastards.

They have to be strong because they're beautiful and people want to uproot them.

You know people want to exploit these trees? In Chile you have Chilean wine palms, men topple the tree and tap the root, get the sap and sell it, it's like honey people put them on bananas, it's a Chilean dish, using the sap, called miel de palma. The wine of the wine palm. So they have to be strong. These trees survived the 9.6 degree earthquake in 1960, and the 8.8 degree earthquake in 2010. Moreso than hurricanes, different palms, not as tall and skinny, though that kind, the matchstick palms like in Los Angeles, they are present here too, like in front of Universidad Católica campus near Metro Universidad Católica (that's the name of the station, Universidad Católica on Línea 1, Line 1).

They're all beautiful. Those trees are currently surviving urban warfare at that intersection, every Friday evening it's a collective struggle on both the police and protester's sides. So they have to be strong.

Re: How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

#37

Post by bush-bby » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 4:38 PM UTC

When I was in elementary school in South Carolina, they would teach us about fort Sumter and the beginning of the civil war. They explained that the fort was built using palmettos because when shot with a cannonball they would simply absorb the ball and bounce it right back off.

Re: How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

#38

Post by dylan604 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 4:55 PM UTC

js2 wrote: post #21

A palm tree, speared by a piece of lumber during Hurricane Andrew: https://imgur.com/a/3f77mEa I was in Miami for Andrew. My dad owned a one-hour photo lab. After the storm, there were tons of insurance adjusters needing their photos developed. My dad and I got his lab open the day after Andrew and ran it on a portable generator for two weeks till the power came back. This was one of the photos we printed during that…

>It's hard to convey the destructiveness of Andrew to folks who weren't there

I grew up with tornados, and know first hand their destructive potential. However, hurricanes scare the shit out of me as not only do you get the destructive winds, it's the flooding on top of that pain that's just truly devastating.

Re: How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

#39

Post by dylan604 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 4:59 PM UTC

saiya-jin wrote: post #20

SanderNL wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much is this in micro-Firkins?

obviously Firkins / 1,000,000. Unless Firkins aren't in sane decimal universe for grownups but one of those feet-to-inches (or miles-to-yard, or feet to X) magical constant ones

everyone knows Firkins are measured in 7-bits. The thing I never can remember is if it is Big-Endian or Little-Endian. things are either quite big or quite small if you get the wrong endianess

Re: How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

#40

Post by DelaneyM » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

dopamean wrote: post #32

DelaneyM wrote: post #26

We have a dense line of palm trees protecting our shoreline on our property (South Caribbean), and ours is the only house on a long coast which hasn't lost metres of land to oceans over the past decade. (Our neighbours have prioritised private beaches, I like my farmland.) It's easily visible on Google Maps satellite view, but I'm not sure I want to post a link to my house... Because they're all that's holding the pr…

How is your land going to hold up as the neighbors' is eaten away?

We're not going to lose our land from the edges, if that's what you're asking. It's actually causing a bit of an issue right now because our land has been retained while the beach has disappeared, so it's no longer possible to walk the beach except at lowest tide. slOne of my neighbors has requested (with a legal letter) that we remove our trees and landscape in a continuous beach.