Minimal Damage from Ian - Mostly PITA

Let me start out with the good stuff.  The weather predictions I talked about were very accurate.  I don't think we had even a gust to cat 1 hurricane level (75 mph) and "gusts don't count;" that definition of hurricane is one solid minute of straight line winds at that level.  We never lost power for a second.  While it was a windy, rainy 24 hours or so, there was little damage.  In fact, the only damage pretty much came from my believing the forecasts a bit too much and preparing too little, but more of that later. 

A widely known but rarely stated reality about tropical storms and hurricanes is what a pain in the ass they are.  Prep time (even if you don't have to get within a mile of store parking lot, like us), figuring out what level to prep to (cat 3 or 4 gets more attention than lower categories) and the inevitable PITA cleanup after the storm.  With losing our palm trees after our August of '19 lightning strike, and having our oak removed this June, you'd think I wouldn't have as much cleanup.  Not that I can tell.  I have half of my backyard neighbor's trees in my yard and and almost as much junk from my next door neighbor's trees.  And I only have those two neighbors, not three like many people do. 

The long story.  Since much earlier in the week, it was apparent we would not get Ian - at least, not as a hurricane.  Every prediction had it as a hurricane somewhere over on the west coast, initially (and finally!) coming ashore around Port Charlotte, then various places farther north on the west coast and at one point, coming ashore south of Tallahassee (the state capital) - followed by retracing those steps toward the south and back onshore the west coast of the state.  We were always looking at tropical storm winds.  

You might have gathered that I don't pay much attention to tropical storms.  (WARNING: Gross simplifications ahead)  Aside from a longer duration, they're really not terribly different from a thunderstorm.  A typical thunderstorm has winds from 30 to 50 mph, and a severe thunderstorm has winds over 55 mph.  A summer thunderstorm actually lasts about 20 minutes but as the thunderhead collapses, it can push air up and build another storm so that they seem longer but even then rarely last an hour.  A tropical storm has winds of 45 to 74 mph and can last hours upon hours.  

Since we have something like 80 to 100 hours of thunderstorm time every year (my guess) I have the opinion that my house and everything around here can handle tropical storm level threats.  I don't even notice when we get one.  So when the forecasts said a tropical storm was coming, I treated it like a thunderstorm.  I essentially said, "so what?" and did very little.  

Everything was going along just peachy until the NWS suddenly upped our tropical storm warning to a hurricane warning around 11 AM on Wednesday.  Even though our local forecasts were saying winds would reach 40 sustained to maybe 60 on gusts and the probability plots showed the chances of hurricane winds were about 35%, we decided to put up the shutters.  Unlike any other storm we've prepared for, we only did the north and east windows because that's the direction that other storms hit us the hardest from.  

Since much of that work was being done in the rain with more forecast, I thought the ham antennas would be fine and didn't plan to do my usual hurricane prep, which is to crank over the tower, pull the antennas and crank the tower back up.  When I walked around the house to the east side, I saw something that made my blood run cold. 

Back in the late '80s/early '90s, when I put up the tower, I did a DIY house bracket.  An electronics tech I was working with at the time did the welding for me of a couple pieces of angle iron.  In '16, when I did the replacement of the steel pole with aluminum, I drew up this view of the house bracket minus the house. 

The white parts are the angle iron, and the face on the right is up against the house.  It's bolted into the house's roof trusses with two 5/16" x 2" long lag bolts and the little red circle on the right is a rough idea of where one is.  The other is off the left end of this picture.

What terrified me was that I saw that bracket was pulled out of the roof trusses and the tower was just standing there, rocking slightly in the wind.  There were only two things I could think to do; either crank it over and leave it over through the worst of the storm (top end leaning on a ladder) or try to find bigger lag bolts to reattach it to the house.  I thought I had a couple of long - like maybe 6" - lag bolts but they've teleported themselves into another part of the multiverse. I had some slight larger lag bolts - 3/8 instead of 5/16 and much to my relief, they worked.   I thought everything was peachy.  

Today, everything got worse.  At about 8AM as I was doing a morning inspection, I found 1/2 of one element of my HF antenna, a log periodic beam, had broken off.  The break looked ragged, not clean, so it fractured.  I was alarmed but couldn't do anything other than note it.  Around lunch time, I went outside to look things over when there was a break in the rain, and everything was worse.  

The other half of that T6 element had broken off.  When I went around the side of the house I could see the house bracket had ripped out the new lag bolts and the tower was just swaying in the wind like yesterday.  Winds were in the vicinity of 40 gusting 65 at the airport, less than 3 miles from us.

So I cranked the tower over and it's now resting on the wooden ladder with the end of the T6 antenna about a foot above ground.  I didn't get a picture, but this is one originally from last winter when I replaced the top antenna - except I put red marks around the two halves of the element that broke off. The position of the tower and the ladder is almost exactly the same.  The oak tree in the background is long gone.

The antenna can probably be fixed by trimming back the very end of the broken off halves and reattaching them to the pieces of the element still in place.  That could change the element length slightly, but it shouldn't be significant.  The house bracket concerns me simply because I don't know why the lag bolts pulled out in the first place.  My gut feeling is to increase the size of the lag bolts again; either to 7/16 or 1/2" and make them longer so they go into (hopefully) virgin wood in the roof trusses.  

All that said, we're clearly in much better shape than the folks over where they got the Cat 4 Ian.  There's a world of difference between the storm they got and what hit us.  We never lost power, we didn't lose any roof shingles, and the only damage at all is this antenna and tower.  The only unknown I have is that my backyard neighbor's tree grew over the roof of the shop and I was concerned the branches rubbing on the shingles would damage the roof.  It turns out that those branches broke off and are lying between the fence and the back of that part of the house.  I can't see the shingles to make sure they're good and can't get a ladder up in that area until I cut down the branches.