Heavy rainfall was predicted for April 2. We had the rain but there were also extremely high winds. I was in town for a doctor’s appointment. Patients and staff sheltered in the basement there. Molly was on the ridge and experienced the worst of it.
Bands of high wind crossed our ridge from west to east, like tines on a rake, toppling or breaking oaks, hickories, maples, and pines. Fortunately our buildings were mostly spared (a branch punched a hole in a shed’s roof). The garden and solar panel were also spared. The neighboring camp was also spared. These areas were the gaps between the tines.
I’m showing a few photos and the commentary will begin south of the garden and move northwards. South of the garden there was a stand of tall pines that shaded the solar panels in midday during winter. Those pines are mostly gone leaving a couple of stragglers. One of the pines when it fell lightly brushed the southern fence of the garden.
A large maple fell into the garden area with its top just brushing the frame for a pair of solar panels. Power for our neighbors was out for days; power lines lay on the ground in the hollow. We’ve been lucky and still have power. This had been one of the maples we’d tapped for maple sap in the past.
The county line road between the garden and the group of buildings that make up our home is filled with downed trees. This large pine snapped off about 12 to 16 feet from the ground.
I’ve been cutting a path to the road from the ATV shed following the trail we normally use. The branches are from fallen oak and maple trees. There’s a lot of cleanup still to do clearing the branches.
A few trees fell to the north of us but the tines dug deeply into the hillside to the north of the camp. This is a relatively flat section of road along a hillside. Trees fell across the road and a path for our ATV and UTV has been cleared (thanks Tom for helping). This large oak’s trunk shattered from the force of the wind. A large plank-like section from the trunk lies about 20 feet away further north.
There’s a lot of cutting and clearing required. My plan is to first clear a path through the trees across roads on our property. Further south there is less clearing involved. Once the path has been cleared I need to go back and widen the space for larger vehicles. Cut oak, maple, and hickory will be split and stacked. These roads are important if there’s ever a fire out here. Keeping them clear would help control the spread.
It’s going to take some getting used to the changes in our forest.
I’m a bit slower on the seasonal post this time. Something always seems to push itself ahead of going through photos to create a post, making adjustments to size and levels, and then sitting down to actually write the thing.
This is being written at the time of year when our solar power allotment shifts from excellent to maybe. We’ve stopped using the large refrigerator and gone to the smaller winter refrigerator. Towards the end of this year and the beginning of next the sun will pretty much be behind trees.
Autumn is glorious in its color and the lower sun seems to put light in the forest in different ways than we were used to in summer. Tree leaves glimmer and it’s easy to stop what we’re doing and just look at the wonder around us.
Now, on to last summer.
This is a fragment of a hornet’s nest found on the road on the way to the mailbox. The entrance to the nest is a slender tube with thin paper walls.
This was taken in early June, still spring, and it shows Indian Pipe emerging from the moss that is our yard on the north side of the house.
Cancer root appears at about the same time.
Happy solar panels on the 26th of June. These are on the west edge of the garden. At the time this post is written these panels, which catch the earliest sun, don’t have sun on them until after 10:30 in the morning.
What is paradise without its snake. This is the garden in early June. The black snake had its head and half its body down a critter hole in the bed. By the time I came back with the camera it had withdrawn from the hole. A couple of pictures later it had left the bed and was heading south away from me.
This is a Devil’s Dipstick mushroom with a visiting bug. These mushrooms pop up every now and again in the yard and I can’t remember if we’ve ever posted a photo of one. Two days later it had disappeared.
Molly spotted this Luna Moth on the shop wall. The moth in its mature form lives just a day to reproduce.
Our grandson Elijah came to visit in August and one of the things we did was hand him a camera and we went through the yard searching for all the different kinds of mushrooms we have. Here’s one of his photos.
Natural gas wells, besides the natural gas they produce, create pollution. The most common pollution is errant and deliberate methane emissions. Just about every well we’ve looked at had a minor leak of some sorts. Sometimes the leak is audible from a distance as a hissing sound. Gas wells with storage tanks have vents to the atmosphere for methane and other gases. Some gas wells like this one have regular sizeable emissions as part of the plunger lift process for removing fluid from the deepest part of the production casing.
The other type of pollution is created by the fluid brought, along with the natural gas, from underground formations. This fluid can be brine (one local well had brine with a salt concentration comparable to 4 pounds of table salt per gallon of water, see this permit page 7), can be petroleum (usually oil, some wells can produce a low octane gasoline), or a mixture of the two. This fluid is kept in storage tanks at the well site. The fluid is removed by a vac truck that sucks the fluid out of a tank. The brine is disposed of by underground injection in special class 2 wells. The oil is saved and sold. It costs money to dispose of brine so it easy to see how some natural gas producers are willing to fudge a bit, leaving a valve open on a vac truck leaking brine as the truck goes from well to well emptying tanks.
State and in some cases federal regulations attempt to protect the environment with regulations regarding storage tanks. In West Virginia storage tanks need to be within secondary containment, a dike or other structure able to hold the contents of the tank in case of a catastrophic event. Since secondary containment can also hold rainwater there needs to be a mechanism or process to remove rainwater from the containment. Usually this is a pipe through the containment with a valve.
West Virginia’s regulators have been confused about the requirements of secondary containment for double wall tanks, not following federal requirements and state regulation. So it’s not uncommon to find double wall tanks in West Virginia without secondary containment even though they don’t have overfill protection and the tanks are situated within feet of a stream. At the time we examined the federal regulations they did not exempt plastic double wall storage tanks from SPCC requirements for added secondary containment.
This is the storage tank at 47-039-02026 and the stains from an overflow weeks earlier are still evident. The tank sits within an earth dike as its secondary containment. We’ve seen several problems with earth secondary containment. The walls erode over time. Deer and other animals going into the containment tend to follow a trail that ends up lowering the height of the secondary containment at that spot. At this well even though there is secondary containment, when there was a spill in the past, the fluids seeped through the base of the containment where the dike sits on the soil surface. There was no requirement for keying the dike to the soil during construction which would have prevented the fluid migrating on the heavily compacted clay soil surface through the less compacted soil used as the dike.
The fluid appears to have overflowed from the trap door at the top of the tank, though most of the discoloration also appears to come from the seam where the top joins the double wall tank. The vertical pipe is the inlet source of fluids under pressure from the well or separator vessel. There are two capped fixtures to the right of the vertical pipe and these are for extraction of the fluids.
In most cases tanks we have seen have not had their top hatches locked. The Chemical Safety Board has documented a number of cases where people have been killed or injured after climbing on top of tanks to see what the tanks hold. Emissions can be explosive. Sometimes people climb onto a tank which contains low octane gasoline or drip to use it to run farm equipment.
The vent for this tank is on top, an open T pipe circled in red. It’s possible to have the tank emissions return to the production line by adding pressure but oil and gas companies feel that the cost is prohibitive even though the bill would be paid within a few years by increased production.
This wasn’t a large spill so discoloration of the soil was limited to a foot from the edge of tank. Past spills have contaminated the soil so the salts are attractive to animals such as deer whose tracks are visible within the containment. Gas wells with their various spills create artificial salt licks for animals.
We’ve checked this well periodically over the years and this is the first time we’ve seen the secondary containment drainage pipe’s valve closed. The previous time water from a rain was dripping out. We’ve not bothered to keep records of our visits so it’s not possible to be accurate for how long the valve was always seen open; we’ll say five years.