"Morgans" writes:
wrote
Severe thunderstorm at my house. Needless to say, glad I was wishing
to be up there then wishing to be down here :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8XDzUbVT7Y

I would have stayed out much longer but the trees were making some
ominous cracking noises that you can hear on the video especially
before my comments (subtitled throughout the video). I "toned down"
the wind noise about 15 percent in the video, it was that loud.

Yep, and if you know what's good for you, you will cut down those tall
scraggly yellow pines, before a strong wind blows from the wrong direction,
and they end up on top of your house. That cracking sound was them starting
to break, and get weak.

I'm betting that they used to be in a big forest of like trees, a developer
came in and cut lots of them down to put in a bunch of houses.

While they were in a tightly bunched forest, they protected each other, by
slowing the wind down, and leaning on each other if they got moving too
much. Also, with a bunch cut down, they get a whole lot more light, and
start growing very fast, and that makes them even weaker.

A friend had one land on his roof, only to have some branches break off a
few feet long, to spear through to roof plywood, and through the sheetrock.
If he had not gotten off the throne when he did, he would have gotten
speared. How do I know this? I cut the tree off his roof, and patched the
holes!

I'll second the motion. My son had very large trees topple
on his house on two separate occasions. The first wasn't
too bad -- hit the garage end of the house with minor damage
other than taking out overhead utility lines and blocking
the driveway for quite some time until removed. The second
just about took off the opposite end of the house -- most of
the roof gone, large portion of the ceilings, and water
damage to nearly everything.