Lightning

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

[Wolfman]

Florida is not only the sunshine state, but the lightning capital. We get some very highly charged storms. Folks are uneasy, especially after some kid got zapped going to football practice a while back. FHSAA has strict regulations regarding it during sporting events. See/hear lightning/thunder--suspend the game for 30 minutes. If no more you can resume. If the is more, you reset the clock. I had a high school football game a few years ago where we didn't finish till 12:30 AM.
You're lucky the tree did not catch on fire. A condo over on Sanibel Island did from lightning last week.

[Ken]

Hit tree in the yard during Monday nights storm.

I was inside and the house, about 30' from our Maple tree and it felt like a mortar round hit

Had to fly out Tue AM - so didnt see it till I got back home today - Blew a lot of the bark off and you can see the split line down the trunk

That's a Sycamore, not a maple, you idiot.

[poptart]

There is unrest in the forest,
There is trouble with the trees,...

[Smackie Chan]

That's a Sycamore, not a maple, you idiot.

No wonder those pancakes tasted funny.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

There is unrest in the forest,
There is trouble with the trees,...

[Carson]

Yo Marty, you left this plugged in:

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

Damn you, Carson...

:x

...let sleeping dogs lie!!!

:x :x :x :x

[poptart]

let sleeping dogs lie!!!

[Screw_Michigan]

Yo Marty, you left this plugged in:

Oh my.

[mvscal]

It's an American Sycamore.

[Derron]

When I put this thread up - I held the feint hope somebody here might have had a tree hit by lightning and would say whether it lived or died

It's the biggest tree on the east side of the propery and would be a bitch to cut out, as well as looking like total hell

Internet research suggests it's a 50/50 at best and I'll have to wait a year to know for sure

That tree is history. Just cut it down. Best thing you can do to a sycamore weed tree like that. No tree has that amount of damage and lives.

[Carson]

Hold on now.

Harvey Updyke has a magic potion for your tree.

Roll Damn Tide.

[Dinsdale]

2nd vote for "dead" from the guys who live in the tree capital.

Once you get a split into the trunk, it's done. Might take a couple of years, but it's 100% over for that one.

[Derron]

not 100% according to what I've read

it didnt lose any major branches and the tree is very healthy both of hich work in its favor

right now I'm debating whether to bolt it or not - the split isnt very wide (less than 1/4") so leaning against that as the bolts might to more bleeding than good

Ok..knock yourself out trying to save a tree that has over 50% of its bark knocked off, and exposes the cambium layer to all kinds of vectors, and clearly is split down to the pholeum layer ( the vascular tissue in plants that conducts sugars and other metabolic products downward from the leaves.) Not to mention that ....try and follow me here, there just might have been a tremendous amount of heat conducted through the tree during the lighting strike that will clearly have damaged all plant tissues.

All that bullshit you are reading about bolting the tree and painting it with wound kote is just that bullshit that some arborist wants you to try and save a tree that is history. A sycamore of that age and size is marginal in any conditions. They have a stringy wood structure and high water content. Good electrical conductors.

So let put this in a context that even a KC resident can understand. Next electrical storm, grab yourself a 20 foot piece of conduit and run outside and hold it up. When the lighting strikes it and grounds through your body, and smokes half your skin away, and boils your guts like a pot of water, gives you compound fractures on all of your limbs, and it does not kill you right away, then you can hope your doctor gets on the internet and finds a site where he can try futile attempts to save your ass. A human becomes a rotting pile of meat when struck by lighting and very dead. The tree is the same, it is just going to take a bit to show that it is very dead.

But go ahead and believe what those internet sites are telling you. I have only planted about 10,000 trees over my career and put the saw to half that many at least. Scyamore were the scourge of a landscape contractor and facility managers. The roots heave sidewalks, they are surface rooters that play hell on mower blades. They are fucking aphid condos and they have a sticky discharge. We did a removal job in the City of Beaverton in the Candlewood subdivison where we took out over 120 of those fucking weed trees. They had destroyed about a half mile of sidewalk. 24 inch diameter trees.

[Goober McTuber]

Fascinating that Derron has spent so much of his time giving life to 10,000 creatures that can clearly outwit him.

[mvscal]

A human becomes a rotting pile of meat when struck by lighting and very dead.

That's ridiculous. People survive lightning strikes all the time and frequently with minimal or no damage.

[Dinsdale]

While our volume of lightning strikes around here is a drop in the bucket compared to KC, we have more trees in one acre of the area than all of KC put together, so pretty much every lightning bolt hits a tree. Of all the trees I've seen that were hit, every last one where the trunk had a split were done. Sometimes rakes 2-3 years, but it dies. So disease prone that even if the strike didn't zap all the phoelem/zylem, it's going to have something go wrong with it and become a hazard trees.

But don't listen to us U&L guys -- we never deal with trees.

[Ken]

phoelem

:?

phoelem

:?

zylem

:?

Funny when some use technical words they THINK they know how to spell correctly.

[Derron]

phoelem

:?

phoelem

:?

zylem

:?

Funny when some use technical words they THINK they know how to spell correctly.

Oh, spelling smack..how profund...ficking dockhead.

[Dinsdale]

Seems like that means we actually knew what those things were, and weren't furiously Googling, trying to look cool.

[War Wagon]

While our volume of lightning strikes around here is a drop in the bucket compared to KC, we have more trees in one acre of the area than all of KC put together...

My house is surrounded by big, old trees. Oaks, Elms... you name it. I'm constantly out in the yard picking up fallen branches every time a storm comes thru... which is about 3 times a week.

My back is kinda' sore. Could you drop by and help a brother out with some high altitude trimming? I'm sure it's quite safe for a pro such as yourself.

[Dinsdale]

My house is surrounded by big, old trees. Oaks, Elms... you name it.

World's largest fir tree is in Oregon (including the largest of several species).

World's largest pine tree is in... Oregon.

World's largest walnut tree is in Oregon.

World's largest maple tree... take a big guess.

And most of them are in the northwest corner, where a couple of posters here live.

But do tell us more about these big trees.

And yes, trimming high stuff is no picnic. Especially if it's over 100' (none in my yard that high, I think there's 7 over 50', 2 in the 80' range, but the house is only 50 years old). I'll take a pass on that. I'll drop them (no expert by any means), but I'm not going to trim that high.

[War Wagon]

There is unrest in the forest,
There is trouble with the trees,...

This shalt not pass... something that Jsc and I agree on that is.

[Ken]

Seems like that means we actually knew what those things were, and weren't furiously Googling, trying to look cool.

Is that so? Decided to take a quick spin around the Google block... Took the second left onto 'Bullshit Ave.'

Remember, this was written up-thread:

the pholeum layer ( the vascular tissue in plants that conducts sugars and other metabolic products downward from the leaves.)

Nevermind the butchering of the spelling... that's not necessarily the issue here.

the vascular tissue in plants that conducts sugars and other metabolic products downward from the leaves.

Apparently, someone was in fact furiously googling and trying to look cool.
Derron likes to sound more smart than he really is.

[Jay in Phoenix]

When I put this thread up - I held the feint hope somebody here might have had a tree hit by lightning and would say whether it lived or died

It's the biggest tree on the east side of the propery and would be a bitch to cut out, as well as looking like total hell

Internet research suggests it's a 50/50 at best and I'll have to wait a year to know for sure.

Scott,

One crazy storm hit us here in Arizona around 1973 or so. We had a pretty large China Berry tree that looked something like this...



A bolt of lightning struck the tree and split the damn thing right down the middle. One half collapsed and the other stood strong, but scarred and bent at an odd angle. The thing actually did survive for another twenty years or so before it finally gave up the poisonous berries and leaves and became deadwood. That very same night, about twenty minutes or so after the strike, another bolt of of lightning zapped right in front of me, about five feet away from where I was standing near the tree. The smell of ozone and the weird concussive pulse has stayed with me to this day. Fucking blast blistered my eyes for several minutes, but otherwise, I lucked out big time, as I didn't get hit.

Trees can survive lightning strikes, but the damage does take a toll.