Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

indefenseofplants.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 62 posts

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

#41

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

DelaneyM wrote: post #40
dopamean wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How maddeningly shortsighted!

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

#42

Post by thorncorona »

DelaneyM wrote: post #40
dopamean wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does that work when they send a letter telling you how to landscape your land?

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

#43

Post by DelaneyM »

thorncorona wrote: post #42
DelaneyM wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does that work when they send a letter telling you how to landscape your land?

In this case I laugh to myself and ask my lawyers to reply.

It's a bit more nuanced than I make it sound (https://www.ogierproperty.ky/publications/public-access-righ...), but it's hard to make the argument that I've intentionally extended my property to block the beach when the original property lines are maintained and the trees doing the work are 20 years old.

Due to erosion of artificial beaches and our access laws, my neighbors are actually losing a few feet of private land every year. I'm just kicking back and literally yelling at them to get off my backyard lawn.

I can't wait for their reaction when I get my chicken coop...

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

#44

Post by User23 »

dylan604 wrote: post #38
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.

The surprise aspect of tornadoes can be dangerous too, especially at night. At least hurricanes are relatively predictable.

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

#45

Post by spc476 »

dylan604 wrote: post #38
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.

Hurricanes I can deal with (I live in South Florida). You get days of notice so you can prepare the property (and/or get out of the area). Tornados scare me more---they can just pop up and if you are lucky, you may get a few minutes warning.

Perhaps it's just what you get used to growing up (never experienced an earthquake, and they scare me more than tornados).

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

#46

Post by importantbrian »

dylan604 wrote: post #38
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.

I grew up in a place with tornados and now live in a place with hurricanes. I'll take tornados over hurricanes any day. Not because of any difference in destruction, but because of the massive difference in inconvenience. With tornados, you know there is a system moving through a day or two before. There's no real prep to do. Once the storm gets to you you hunker down for a few hours and assuming you don't get hit you're done.

Hurricanes, especially the cape Verde ones, occupy you for what feels like weeks. Irma became a hurricane on August 31st. It didn't hit Florida until September 10th. And it felt even longer than that. You have to start getting food and water and fuel ready. You have to board up your house and help your friends and family put up their shutters. Everyone else is doing the same thing at the same time as you so there are shortages. You leave work in the middle of the day because your co-worker said they found bottled water at Publix. After work, you sit in a line of cars down the block to get gas. You have to make a decision about staying or going. Then after the storm, even if you didn't get a direct hit from the core of the storm, there is tons of cleanup. You often are without power for a long time. My friends who are from here speak nostalgically about hurricane parties. I think they're crazy.

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

#47

Post by importantbrian »

spc476 wrote: post #45
dylan604 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Hurricanes I can deal with (I live in South Florida). You get days of notice so you can prepare the property (and/or get out of the area). Tornados scare me more---they can just pop up and if you are lucky, you may get a few minutes warning. Perhaps it's just what you get used to growing up (never experienced an earthquake, and they scare me more than tornados).

I have lived in places where I've had to deal with both and it's the long notice involved with hurricanes that make them worse to me. Tornados are over and done with. There's no prep and the area they cover is small so you're unlikely to be directly effected by them. But with hurricanes there's so much prep to do, shortages to deal with, etc. and even if you don't take a direct hit there's often a ton of clean up and dealing with long power outages, etc.

Tornados are in and out of your life in a blink. Hurricanes you have to live with for weeks or months it feels like.

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

#48

Post by sophacles »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #10

Because they bend. During a storm they'll just go with the wind. One of the sickest, saddest sounds during a storm is when a pine or oak snaps. Oaks especially will creak and moan during a storm. Right before the wet snap of it breaking it will sometimes moan/creak loud as if it knows it's fate.

I lived in a pretty old neighborhood for a while. The type of neighborhood where the trees on the treebanks are over 100 years old, and have grown to be a full canopy over the road. The branches of these trees are big enough to be trunks themselves.

One day I was sitting out on the porch enjoying a nice evening and I heard what I thought was a bunch of kids "squealing" and then jumping into the pool. The only similar sound I'd ever heard was at the end of "adult swim" breaks at the public pools growing up. Turns out it was one of the giant trees dropping a limb onto the road several blocks away - fortunately no one was hurt but some parked cars were totaled.

It's very much one of those sounds you have to experience to really grasp.

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

#49

Post by tspike »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #34
doubled112 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A simple way to think of Fahrenheit is: 0 degrees is just about the coldest a person can stand, and 100 is the hottest.

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

#50

Post by markdown »

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…

Eventually even coconut trees don't help. I, along with extended family, own a large coconut plantation in Fiji with over 1km of beachfront. Wave erosion has been so bad that in some places it's gone past the first row of trees so that they're detached from the beach and stand alone out at sea at high tide.
Post reply on HN