Merry Christmas Eve, all! Thought I'd post a thread about some of my wood stacks that experienced a little too much holiday excitement...
As some of you may be aware, this December has been ridiculously soggy here in the PNW. We set a new record for the wettest December ever recorded, with rainfall well over 2x the "normal" amount.
We happen to live on a river bank, and flooding is an occasional problem. In fact, the house itself flooded back in '96 -- before we were here. That was an exceptional year, and even downtown Portland was threatened back then.
It hasn't been that bad so far this year, but we have limited stacking space, and so I located three stacks on the low-lying areas of our 1/3 acre property, figuring that the odds were OK: maybe a 5-10% chance of those stacks getting flooded in any given year.
--Well, that optimistic bet went bad this year! I'll post a "before" and "after" photo of the same stack (I posted the same picture of the intact stack earlier this year). It's 100% black locust, largely in rounds with some splits. The cut wood is now 1.5 years old, and I planned to split the rounds early in spring and see how it checked out MC-wise by next October or so.
Here are those before and after pictures of the same stack. Between this one and two others not pictured, I now have about two cords of wood swimming. Very little of it actually washed away -- we bought his 'n' hers chest waders last week, and have been slowly salvaging the floating wood and tossing it onto higher ground. Unfortunately, the other two stacks not pictured were of completely bone-dry (~10%) Douglas fir, some of it even bordering on punkiness. I had planned to burn *all* of that dry doug fir this winter to get it out of the way, but Nature has now changed that plan. Not too worried about the locust; it should wind up about the same after splitting, re-stacking and further seasoning, right?
Geez, and I'd thought that getting this wood situated was a lot of work the first time....
As some of you may be aware, this December has been ridiculously soggy here in the PNW. We set a new record for the wettest December ever recorded, with rainfall well over 2x the "normal" amount.
We happen to live on a river bank, and flooding is an occasional problem. In fact, the house itself flooded back in '96 -- before we were here. That was an exceptional year, and even downtown Portland was threatened back then.
It hasn't been that bad so far this year, but we have limited stacking space, and so I located three stacks on the low-lying areas of our 1/3 acre property, figuring that the odds were OK: maybe a 5-10% chance of those stacks getting flooded in any given year.
--Well, that optimistic bet went bad this year! I'll post a "before" and "after" photo of the same stack (I posted the same picture of the intact stack earlier this year). It's 100% black locust, largely in rounds with some splits. The cut wood is now 1.5 years old, and I planned to split the rounds early in spring and see how it checked out MC-wise by next October or so.
Here are those before and after pictures of the same stack. Between this one and two others not pictured, I now have about two cords of wood swimming. Very little of it actually washed away -- we bought his 'n' hers chest waders last week, and have been slowly salvaging the floating wood and tossing it onto higher ground. Unfortunately, the other two stacks not pictured were of completely bone-dry (~10%) Douglas fir, some of it even bordering on punkiness. I had planned to burn *all* of that dry doug fir this winter to get it out of the way, but Nature has now changed that plan. Not too worried about the locust; it should wind up about the same after splitting, re-stacking and further seasoning, right?
Geez, and I'd thought that getting this wood situated was a lot of work the first time....
