What Blew The Door Off My Shed?

When I came home Saturday, I was greeted by the doors of my shed having been literally blown off!

This was a windy day in Puget Sound country. Many people were inconvenienced by power outages, there are fallen branches everywhere, and it was generally a good day to rediscover that the forces of nature are not to be trifled with.

And yet we do trifle with them. We know that adding greenhouse gasses to our atmosphere is bad for us in the long run; we may not know all the details as to how bad it will be for us, but the science is not really open to rational dispute anymore. While it is impossible to directly attribute any particular storm to global warming, but a trend to more frequent and more violent storms is predicted by the science and the basic reasoning is pretty easy to understand: heat is energy, and when you store more energy in a system, in the absence of some mechanism to stabilize it, the variations in phenomena become more energetic.

Saturday's storm slightly affected my drive into Seattle for a seminar (and it is unfortunate that I had little choice but to add some greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere to accomplish this drive) because utility crews were busy in downtown Seattle. However the more noticeable impact was when I got home; the doors were literally (not figuratively) blown off my shed!

It wasn't as bad a situation as I thought upon first seeming this. The doors are not held on by hinges, but by a split rod that grips one verticle edge of the doors and extends about an inch above and below; these extensions seat into holes in the floor and the wall above the door. It seems likely that the wind caught the door and flung it open fast enough to pop it out of those holes, possibly by slightly raising the roof as well. Repair was easy, I re-seated the door while pressing on the upper wall and the door assembly slid into place.

However I doubt that repair of other damages from violent weather will always be so easy. Let this storm be a reminder!