How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017) | Hacker News Reader

How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

indefenseofplants.com

134 pointsgraderjs60 comments

We have a dense line of palm trees protecting our shoreline on our property (South Caribbean), and ours is the only house on a long coast which hasn't lost metres of land to oceans over the past decade. (Our neighbours have prioritised private beaches, I like my farmland.) It's easily visible on Google Maps satellite view, but I'm not sure I want to post a link to my house...

Because they're all that's holding the property together their root systems are exposed on the seaward side, and they are _massive_. I couldn't build a stronger retaining wall. I wish this article shared some pictures of a palm root system, it's really the most impressive part. Together with seagrape shrubs I think I'm actually reclaiming a few inches a year. I also have some great footage of palm trees bent over nearly 90° in a cat-3 from a few years back.

One thing not mentioned here is the risk under storms of coconuts. In a tropical storm, palm trees become coconut catapults when the trunks whip around at high speed and under tension. We've lost multiple 1"-thick concrete roof tiles to coconut strikes, as well smashing (but not breaching) a cat-3 hurricane door.

Here for the Caribbean content!

They're basically the trees from Seuss's The King's Stilts.

How is your land going to hold up as the neighbors' is eaten away?

We're not going to lose our land from the edges, if that's what you're asking. It's actually causing a bit of an issue right now because our land has been retained while the beach has disappeared, so it's no longer possible to walk the beach except at lowest tide. slOne of my neighbors has requested (with a legal letter) that we remove our trees and landscape in a continuous beach.

How maddeningly shortsighted!

How does that work when they send a letter telling you how to landscape your land?

In this case I laugh to myself and ask my lawyers to reply.

It's a bit more nuanced than I make it sound (https://www.ogierproperty.ky/publications/public-access-righ...), but it's hard to make the argument that I've intentionally extended my property to block the beach when the original property lines are maintained and the trees doing the work are 20 years old.

Due to erosion of artificial beaches and our access laws, my neighbors are actually losing a few feet of private land every year. I'm just kicking back and literally yelling at them to get off my backyard lawn.

I can't wait for their reaction when I get my chicken coop...

> I can't wait for their reaction when I get my chicken coop...

Those are my goals too :)

Hope yours goes well. I'm trying to buy land for privacy trees and small farm. Hopefully, one day..

Eventually even coconut trees don't help. I, along with extended family, own a large coconut plantation in Fiji with over 1km of beachfront. Wave erosion has been so bad that in some places it's gone past the first row of trees so that they're detached from the beach and stand alone out at sea at high tide.

Absolutely true. We have a reef about 200m offshore that's doing the heavy lifting blocking waves for us, though it's at risk to reef death (SCTLD - Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease).

As someone who recently moved to a part of the US with native palms, a few discoveries that surprised me...

1) Large palms are tough. As in, serious-work-to-pole-saw-through tough. They may looks wispy in the wind, but all of those components (leaves, fruit pods, fruit stalks, leaf shealths) are beyond the strength of an average human to simply pull (tension) apart.

2) Once dried, palm parts are effectively made out of steel.

3) Palms produce a lot of debris. All summer long.

4) Fully developed Queen palm seed stalks are heavy. Maybe 50 lbs?

5) The Sears Tower is actually a 3x3 grid of individual towers, connected in a way that allows for lateral motion. This mimics a palm's trunk structure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower#Planning_and_co...

Have a couple of palms near the back yard fence and yeah would not want that debris to hit me on the head. From 10m high could be a KO!

I don't get it why cities plant palms along streets: they offer little or no shade and they drop enormous leaves that can hurt people or damage cars.

I grew up in south Florida where all the streets were lined with palm trees. I never heard of a person or car being hurt/damaged by falling palm leaves. It has probably happened, but must be exceedingly rare. Then again, I never saw downed leaves along the roads or any city trucks doing pick up, so now I wonder how and when they were picked up.

I've seen a few fronds down in Southern California (also many palm trees there) - city maintenance picks them up I presume, and if the trees are "maintained" they don't actually drop many (because they get cut before they can fall).

Any time I visit areas with palm trees there seems to be a small army of gardeners that maintain all but the “wild” palm trees. Also pretty sure there is a cottage industry of people who harvest the coconuts.

Coconuts? Most palms don't.

Those are quite tall palm trees you have there

To save you the lookup: 50 lbs = ~22.5 kg

Is it just Canadians near the U.S. border that constantly convert temperatures and weights on the fly?

I see replies and bots all over the Internet for this, but I usually have it roughed out already.

Mexican near the border here, same.

Chilean-American here, absolutely. All the time. I still can barely do fahrenheit, and I've come to prefer the American system of feet and inches for human height.

A simple way to think of Fahrenheit is: 0 degrees is just about the coldest a person can stand, and 100 is the hottest.

Oh yeah it comes from body heat.

How much is this in micro-Firkins?

obviously Firkins / 1,000,000. Unless Firkins aren't in sane decimal universe for grownups but one of those feet-to-inches (or miles-to-yard, or feet to X) magical constant ones

everyone knows Firkins are measured in 7-bits. The thing I never can remember is if it is Big-Endian or Little-Endian. things are either quite big or quite small if you get the wrong endianess

2. dried fallen palm leaves are extremely dangerous, they are sharp as a knife. I was getting rid of some and it just touched my arm, I now have a 4" scar where it looks like I was trying to self harm.

3. I don't think so, my bamboo or cotton wood trees make so much more debris. At least with palms they are large debris and can easily be tossed.

One thing people don't realize is how much of a pain it is to cut leaves down. I have a chainsaw on a stick that works wonders vs those terrible curved saw things.

I had a Chinese Elm tree on my property back in the 90s. Dropped little leaves 365 days a year that got everywhere. I also had a palm tree. The big leaves that fell on occasion were easy to deal with.

4. Dried leaves are highly flammable.

Had to clear a big pile of dried mixed palm and cordyline leaves, and decided to burn them. Big mistake. They're full of oils. Be very careful with that. Annoyingly for the same reason they don't really rot, so getting rid of them can be a pain.

Use them as roofing on a pergola? Mimic what lots of equatorial cultures do.

> The Sears Tower is actually a 3x3 grid of individual towers, connected in a way that allows for lateral motion. This mimics a palm's trunk structure.

If you are easily frightened, do not go up to the top on a windy day. It sways in the wind like a palm tree (side-to-side 10-15 feet, 3-4 meters). And the creaking noises! If you close your eyes, it is easy to imagine that you are in a tall ship 150 years ago.

A palm tree, speared by a piece of lumber during Hurricane Andrew:

https://imgur.com/a/3f77mEa

I was in Miami for Andrew. My dad owned a one-hour photo lab. After the storm, there were tons of insurance adjusters needing their photos developed. My dad and I got his lab open the day after Andrew and ran it on a portable generator for two weeks till the power came back. This was one of the photos we printed during that period. Fun times.

The palm trees did fine. Miami also has ficus trees planted all over the place. Huge canopies. Huge root structures, but the roots are very broad and shallow. In my neighborhood, every ficus tree was toppled with its roots pulling up sidewalks and grass. This is not from Andrew, but it looks like this:

https://cf-images.us-east-1.prod.boltdns.net/v1/static/56181...

It's hard to convey the destructiveness of Andrew to folks who weren't there, but this gives some idea:

https://historycollection.com/31-images-hurricane-andrew-des...

Apparently that tree is a celebrity. I didn't realize there were a bunch of picture of it on the Internet till now:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hurricane+andrew+palm+tree&ia=imag...

> Miami also has ficus trees planted all over the place.

Fun story. In 2005, South Florida took two direct hits: Katrina in late August, Wilma in October.

During Katrina, a neighbor’s massive ficus tree was toppled. They were in the process of removing it and had only taken care of the top when Wilma’s impending arrival halted work. Wilma put the tree upright.

Thankfully those storms were nuisances compared to Andrew. I was north of where the eyewall hit, but seeing the aftermath has stuck with me for life. It is hard to believe it has been 30 years.

>It's hard to convey the destructiveness of Andrew to folks who weren't there

I grew up with tornados, and know first hand their destructive potential. However, hurricanes scare the shit out of me as not only do you get the destructive winds, it's the flooding on top of that pain that's just truly devastating.

The surprise aspect of tornadoes can be dangerous too, especially at night. At least hurricanes are relatively predictable.

I live in NC now. Tornadoes in the summer are not uncommon. One of the first things I purchased was a weather alert radio we keep in our bedroom. I have all of the alerts disabled except for tornado warnings.

Hurricanes I can deal with (I live in South Florida). You get days of notice so you can prepare the property (and/or get out of the area). Tornados scare me more---they can just pop up and if you are lucky, you may get a few minutes warning.

Perhaps it's just what you get used to growing up (never experienced an earthquake, and they scare me more than tornados).

I have lived in places where I've had to deal with both and it's the long notice involved with hurricanes that make them worse to me. Tornados are over and done with. There's no prep and the area they cover is small so you're unlikely to be directly effected by them. But with hurricanes there's so much prep to do, shortages to deal with, etc. and even if you don't take a direct hit there's often a ton of clean up and dealing with long power outages, etc.

Tornados are in and out of your life in a blink. Hurricanes you have to live with for weeks or months it feels like.

I love reading someone else's "comfort" with a tornado as meh that I have. However, we do know a lot about them, and can hear a warning, check out the location and then decide if we need to go hide or not. Simple info like if the danger zone is east of you, you're okay. If the danger zone is southwest-ish of you, then start paying closer attention. The fact that they can zoom in to the doppler images and see the circulation, provide the warning up to 15 mins in advance, see the debris to determine if it is on the ground or not, etc is absolutely fascinating and life saving abilities. Plus, they can extrapolate the path and tell people by street intersection that you're directly in the path. Hurricane predictions are like "well, we've told you for 3+ days to get the hell outta here in a wide swath of predicitions, but you didn't so...good luck!" There's no it's already passed us, so now we just hope to avoid the hail. Hurricanes pass, then you have the potential of bonus tornados, storm surge, and oh, the storm may just park directly on top of you and drop 40" of rain over the next couple of days.

Yeah, I'll take a good ol' spring thunderstorm any day.

I grew up with both hurricanes and tornadoes. Tornadoes freak me out.. I remember watching The Wizard of Oz.. the tornado scene with the funnel in background really freaked me out as a kid. Also, read Night of the Twisters in the early 90's.

The one thing that freaks me out about hurricanes is the human element leading up to, during, and the days/weeks after the storm... all kinds of people come out of the woodwork and law enforcement usually has their hands full. I had a friend get a gun pulled on him for "buying too much gas" leading up to a storm. Issues with theft, roving bands of people, etc.

I grew up in a place with tornados and now live in a place with hurricanes. I'll take tornados over hurricanes any day. Not because of any difference in destruction, but because of the massive difference in inconvenience. With tornados, you know there is a system moving through a day or two before. There's no real prep to do. Once the storm gets to you you hunker down for a few hours and assuming you don't get hit you're done.

Hurricanes, especially the cape Verde ones, occupy you for what feels like weeks. Irma became a hurricane on August 31st. It didn't hit Florida until September 10th. And it felt even longer than that. You have to start getting food and water and fuel ready. You have to board up your house and help your friends and family put up their shutters. Everyone else is doing the same thing at the same time as you so there are shortages. You leave work in the middle of the day because your co-worker said they found bottled water at Publix. After work, you sit in a line of cars down the block to get gas. You have to make a decision about staying or going. Then after the storm, even if you didn't get a direct hit from the core of the storm, there is tons of cleanup. You often are without power for a long time. My friends who are from here speak nostalgically about hurricane parties. I think they're crazy.

I absolutely hated hurricanes growing up as a child (aside from getting to miss school) but I once got to experience the eye and it was incredible. The calmness feels extra calm after days of storm.

My sister lived across from the zoo and evacuated for Andrew. I went with her back the house after the storm and the neighborhood looked like a disorganized lumber yard. Nothing was standing.

Probably that was the Country Walk development. It’s next to the zoo. 90% of its 1700 homes were destroyed by Andrew. It was not built to code.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/weather/hurricane/article172...

Because they bend. During a storm they'll just go with the wind. One of the sickest, saddest sounds during a storm is when a pine or oak snaps. Oaks especially will creak and moan during a storm. Right before the wet snap of it breaking it will sometimes moan/creak loud as if it knows it's fate.

Surprisingly loud.

A tree next to my house snapped in half during some freak 90mph (145km/h) gusts and it sounded like a small explosion, though not as fast since it didn't all happen at once. But I really though something had exploded until I noticed the tree out the window was no longer quite as tall as it used to be. It was a large, live tree too, but can't remember what kind it was. It was on a lot next to my house that was undeveloped for at least 100 years, and farmland some time before that.

Was paddling down a river the other day and a giant oak fell. Sounded like gunshots at first, then maybe fireworks, and by that time I noticed what looked like a T-Rex moving around among the trees, the tree finally came down on another tree and fell into the water.

I lived in a pretty old neighborhood for a while. The type of neighborhood where the trees on the treebanks are over 100 years old, and have grown to be a full canopy over the road. The branches of these trees are big enough to be trunks themselves.

One day I was sitting out on the porch enjoying a nice evening and I heard what I thought was a bunch of kids "squealing" and then jumping into the pool. The only similar sound I'd ever heard was at the end of "adult swim" breaks at the public pools growing up. Turns out it was one of the giant trees dropping a limb onto the road several blocks away - fortunately no one was hurt but some parked cars were totaled.

It's very much one of those sounds you have to experience to really grasp.

I heard this after a ice storm then high winds. Creepy sound when it creaks all the way into the crack sound.

Monocots are pretty cool. Growing up in the Midwest, I was surrounded by corn, another monocot which is really just a tall grass. I used to imagine that a giant walking through a cornfield, tassels tickling his toes, wouldn't be all that different from me walking around the back yard on grass that had gone to seed.

That's a cool imagining :) Nice image :)

Amen to deep roots.

I had to remove a tiny 5 inch diameter palm tree from my back yard and it took me about 2 hours of heavy pickaxing and the shoveling. And ultimately, I had to tie a rope on the tall end, and have my wife lever it from the root with the pickaxe. Extremely hard to remove these bastards.

They have to be strong because they're beautiful and people want to uproot them.

You know people want to exploit these trees? In Chile you have Chilean wine palms, men topple the tree and tap the root, get the sap and sell it, it's like honey people put them on bananas, it's a Chilean dish, using the sap, called miel de palma. The wine of the wine palm. So they have to be strong. These trees survived the 9.6 degree earthquake in 1960, and the 8.8 degree earthquake in 2010. Moreso than hurricanes, different palms, not as tall and skinny, though that kind, the matchstick palms like in Los Angeles, they are present here too, like in front of Universidad Católica campus near Metro Universidad Católica (that's the name of the station, Universidad Católica on Línea 1, Line 1).

They're all beautiful. Those trees are currently surviving urban warfare at that intersection, every Friday evening it's a collective struggle on both the police and protester's sides. So they have to be strong.

Survivor bias. The ones that don't survive a hurricane don't grow up.

Another phrase for 'survivor bias' is evolution under natural selection.

Yeah he's not really using the term "survivor bias" in the way that statisticians do.

...and don't reproduce, and don't pass on their genes to future generations. Natural selection.

When I was in elementary school in South Carolina, they would teach us about fort Sumter and the beginning of the civil war. They explained that the fort was built using palmettos because when shot with a cannonball they would simply absorb the ball and bounce it right back off.

I've got a palm on the border with my neighbor, and it's a tank.

And you might think dealing with tire-like leaves is a hassle, until you've lived somewhere surrounded by Oak trees and a neighborhood association that demands raking.

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