[Bob Carriere]

The day after the wind storm a neighbour who has a direct line of sight with the canvass garages near the barn told me that the canvas garages where hovering above the ground and flapping around like crazy.

I grinned and thank him for the graphic is not somewhat exagerated description. His large BBQ on his deck was lifted and thrown into his patio door....did not break the glass but wrecked the screening.

Well on closer inspection last weekend with Rob I discovered that he may have been right. For stability and for added head room we usually build wooden boxes from 2x8 two feet long and fill them with gravel/sand before nailing the last piece shut. The results are wooden boxes that are ten feet long about 8 inches square and two guys can hardly move them by hand... we usually use the bucket on the tractor and straps. So each canvass garage has two of them on each side....... anchor plates at the bottom of the steel vertical steel pipe structure are bolted to the boxes with 2 inch lag bolts.

The wind was strong enough to lift the whole tent...some boxes had sheeared the lag bolts, broken the base plate and/or been turned on their side and were moved sideways from the original location by at least 2 feet. Most of the 1/4 cheap nylon rope had either snapped or ripped the eyelets out of the canvass.

What saved them.... what kept them hovering and not going in orbit.... just for the hell of it I had tied old section of 3/4 inch manila rope to the cab 12 stored inside and over the ridge pole of the shelter.... and tied loosely at that.

What the neighbour saw was the tent floating in the air off the ground held back by the rope on the inside.

Conclusion...... if you have something heavy stored inside a canvass garage... tie the garage to it... front and back..... it would take strong wind to move a cab 12....

Some houses just across from my street...recently built in the last 4 to 5 years had significant damage when huge section of roof covering was blown off.... luckily we had no damage on the house or barn.

Ah the pleasures of living in the country !!!!!!

Bob