Driver gets lucky when storm fells tree

boing
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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/07/25/driver-gets-lucky-when-storm-f.html
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Look down the road. TWO drivers get lucky.

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Holy shit. ONE tree falling down is understandable. WTF is going on that so many of them fell at once?

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I haven’t watched the video, but it sounds a lot more sexy than I would have guessed.

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“It’s the plants. They can release chemicals.”

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This is the most educational video you will ever see of two drivers getting lucky in the bush.

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So…

the premise of Thunderdome is a lie?

:wink:

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It wasn’t luck, it was a noble sacrifice by those first two trees who chose to fall first to protect the humans from the coming onslaught.

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Pretty sweet soundtrack, too.

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Shoddy workmanship. They just don’t make forests like they used to.

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My guess is that their root systems are pretty tangled up in each other, and the ground is pretty loose. Hell, they might even all be the SAME organism, if they’re of certain species.

Trees is weird, yo.

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That was my though too. Or a beaver resistance group weakened a row of trees. Do they have beavers in Australia?

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And every other year we get casualties from that sort of thing in the environs around Seattle. Wind storms are not to be trifled with.

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If all the other trees were jumping off a cliff, would you too? Yes, yes I would.

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No - not deadly enough.

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Was Macbeth in the vicinity or something?

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We could have had it aaaaalll…

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Can’t we just get beyond thunderdome?

I suppose we can’t if this was the only road…

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I agree, (the forest) they’re not like they used to be and, the driver who caught it on camera was pretty smart, he said fuck it, I’m not falling for that.

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If I had to guess, I’d say “convective-cell downburst”.

Downbursts are sort of the watery equivalent of pyroclastic flow - large column of mass injected high into atmosphere which then collapses and falls back down, accelerating to nearly-preposterous velocities as it hits the ground and sprays outward.

With pyroclastic flow, the mass is hot gas and ash, while a downburst is ■■■■■ air with occasional embedded hail.

Downbursts can cause damage similar to moderate-sized tornadoes - the two can sometimes only be distinguished after the fact by damage patterns - tornadoes blow things down in circular patterns, while downburst damage splays radially outward.

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