It’s been a hectic week, so I’m posting this little tidbit much later than I should have for it to be timely 
We were aware that there are some pretty good winds coming down the canyons and into town, but we didn’t realize that we seem to be in the midst of a wind tunnel. Specifically, the wind seems to come straight through our back yard and tunnel between our house and Anne’s house behind us.
To protect our stuff from blowing away, Mom dutifully cranked down our patio table umbrella last Saturday when the winds picked up. I didn’t think much more about it until earlier this week when I looked out the breakfast nook window and saw the umbrella moving side to side in a progressively wider arc. A split second after I thought “Man, I need to go bring that inside” I heard a giant POP and suddenly the umbrella was bent at a 90 degree angle & flying 30 feet east onto the empty lot next door, our sturdy and quite heavy patio chairs were sprawling, and our tempered glass patio tabletop was shattered into zillions of pieces all over the porch. It seems that tempered glass will flex to a point, but when an umbrella that is firmly anchored to a very heavy cast iron base is ripped out from the center of the glass hard enough to bend the pole in half, the force exerted is plenty strong enough to shatter it. Gabriel kept asking why there was ice on the patio…I guess I can see what he means:
This is a really sturdy, heavy-duty umbrella, but it was no match for the Chinooks!
Tempered glass sure does make a mess when it shatters!
The crazy thing is that if you click to view the full-sized image here, you can see a little red speck way, way, way beyond the umbrella. That’s Gabriel’s little bucket, which was next to the water table before the gust and which Matt retrieved, after sweeping up the glass, several hundred feet away.
Besides being upset that our 3-year-new patio table is destroyed (not to mention the umbrella!), we’re seriously considering modifying our landscape plan to make sure the trees are up to the winds and that there are enough on our western property line to protect us in the future!
4 comments
Nicole says:
September 24, 2007 at 9:59 pm (UTC 2 )
Crazy!!! Is it a daily occurrence or was it one bad day? Sounds like a good time to research wind breaks
Mom says:
September 24, 2007 at 4:59 pm (UTC 2 )
I’m glad no one was on the patio when the table “blew”. Did the planters on your porch survive the wind? I was worried about the wind when I was there but I never thought the umbrella would shatter the table top. Sorry. Love Mom
amygeekgrl says:
September 23, 2007 at 6:54 pm (UTC 2 )
ugh. i never would’ve thought about the wind being that strong either.
Corrina says:
September 22, 2007 at 2:39 pm (UTC 2 )
Crazy. Hopefully neither of your children is blown away!