I have seen branches torn off by high winds before but I have never seen a tree completely uprooted like that. Scary!

Tree that big would have taken out a corner or more of their home.

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They were on the lee side of the building, sheltered from the wind.

I've been out in tropical storms (only when 100% necessary I assure you), and cyclonic storms also don't act like one might expect. You can absolutely be just about blown out of your stockings on one side of the street while the other is relatively calm or blowing the other way. Buildings blocking or diverting wind direction make a huge difference.

...in Tropical Storm Bill. Not a super powerful storm but very wet, and the eye went right over us. Do not discount the danger of things getting loosened and then the wind shifting direction. Unlike this one it fell on our house, nearly impaling me with a branch through the roof, and the insurance settlement to fix the damage was $35K.

Close to our house too. We watched in real time as those ~15' roots popped up, just like this video, only closer to us! Those trees shook our house as they landed on the ground - the crashes were about ten mins apart. It was surreal. All thanks to Hurricane Isabel in 2003 which came in here on Virginia's coast.

We were without electricity for 9 days in our particular neighborhood. Thanks to our gas stove and water-heater, we could at least cook and take hot showers. Had throw out a quite a bit of food in freezer but compared to many of our neighbors who had trees thru their roofs, we lucked out.

During the 1989 earthquake inSan Francisco I saw a tree that size go down and bounce back up. I was terrified then and seeing this scares me even more.

Water oaks have shallow root system. Like a pancake.
In sandy soil, they go over pretty easy in high winds.
They are a BITCH to haul off.

We have a 40 foot maple that I’ve seen bend so much I had to go inside because it was making me nervous.

kind of neat to see

Took out a power transformer and a chunk of someones porch roof. Surprising little damage to the house actually. But the whole neighborhood lost power for a week or so.

I remember Irene here on the Virginia coast. Many trees down here too.

"Sorry, I can't do anything until the parts get here". . . poor guy was there every day. We brought him a couple of bottles of water, felt sorry for him. You know he was getting a constant ration of shit because he couldn't fix it.

From the vid anyway.. obviously it was!

Last edited Thu Oct 11, 2018, 01:40 AM - Edit history (1)

It seems like all the main roots are still intact. Get a tree expert out there and save that tree! Also it seems suspicious that the roots are so shallow, like maybe that tree was just planted recently and the roots hadn't all spread underground yet. If that's they case it would explain why it tipped over so easily.

Maple trees have shallow roots but they spread out wide around the trunk. So the wide reach of maple roots will keep them from tipping over. Some trees like the hickory only have one tap root that goes very deep, but the roots don't spread out far from the main trunk. It's the deep tap root that saves the hickory trees from upending like we see here.

Arborists know that a tree's root system below ground is about the same extent as the branches above ground. As with branching above, the dendritic pattern below makes smaller and smaller(weaker) divisions as they grow. On average, these small root branches extend as far from the trunk as the leafy branches extend. On a big tree, the extent may be 40 ft or more. An uprooted tree shows only 10% of its total root system.

These roots are good at gathering water and nutrients, but not always so good at anchoring.

If this tree had been recently transplanted it would explain why the roots weren't very deep. But as you say only a small percentage of the roots are showing in the video.

Another explanation is that Florida topsoil has little clay, it's mostly sand in a lot of areas. The sand makes it hard for plants to anchor themselves in high winds. Here in PA our topsoil is mostly clay, or a clay combination, allowing top-heavy trees to remain in place during high winds.

Kids were watching the tree through the window. Fortunately, it looks like it caused no damage, although that street was blocked for a while, I'm sure.

Huge oak tree outside our apartment. In the thick of the storm, we heard this almost gentle whooshing sound. Next morning saw that this 40 ft tree had been uprooted, just like this one. Fortunately, as with this one, it went away from the building!