7 ms·

How do palm trees survive hurricanes? (2017)

134 points by graderjs 4y ago

jihadjihad 4y ago
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.
- graderjs 4y ago
  That's a cool imagining :) Nice image :)
ethbr0 4y ago
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_construction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower#Planning_and_co...
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  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!
  - forinti 4y ago
    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.
    - irrational 4y ago
      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.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        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).
      - spookthesunset 4y ago
        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.
        quickthrower2 4y ago
        Coconuts? Most palms don't.
  - frupert52 4y ago
    Those are quite tall palm trees you have there
- TobTobXX 4y ago
  To save you the lookup: 50 lbs = ~22.5 kg
  - doubled112 4y ago
    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.
    - elboru 4y ago
      Mexican near the border here, same.
    - daniel-cussen 4y ago
      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.
      - tspike 4y ago
        A simple way to think of Fahrenheit is: 0 degrees is just about the coldest a person can stand, and 100 is the hottest.
        daniel-cussen 4y ago
        Oh yeah it comes from body heat.
  - SanderNL 4y ago
    How much is this in micro-Firkins?
    - saiya-jin 4y ago
      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
- post_break 4y ago
  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.
  - dhosek 4y ago
    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.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    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.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Use them as roofing on a pergola? Mimic what lots of equatorial cultures do.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  > 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.
Exness199507 4y ago
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
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.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  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.
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    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.
- sophacles 4y ago
  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.
- green-salt 4y ago
WalterBright 4y ago
Survivor bias. The ones that don't survive a hurricane don't grow up.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  Another phrase for 'survivor bias' is evolution under natural selection.
  - OneLeggedCat 4y ago
    Yeah he's not really using the term "survivor bias" in the way that statisticians do.
- whyenot 4y ago
  ...and don't reproduce, and don't pass on their genes to future generations. Natural selection.
sergiotapia 4y ago
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.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  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.
js2 4y ago
A palm tree, speared by a piece of lumber during Hurricane Andrew: https://imgur.com/a/3f77mEa 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/5618154292001/45c576b3-3406-4133-8c92-7ed961410e83/7466ac79-29a8-4772-81ce-37cb747473d0/1280x720/match/image.jpg 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-destruction/2/ 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=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hurricane+andrew+palm+tree&ia=imag...
- echoradio 4y ago
  > 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.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >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.
DelaneyM 4y ago
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!
- bombcar 4y ago
  They're basically the trees from Seuss's The King's Stilts.
- dopamean 4y ago
  How is your land going to hold up as the neighbors' is eaten away?
  - DelaneyM 4y ago
    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.
    - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      How maddeningly shortsighted!
smm11 4y ago
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.
bush-bby 4y ago
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.

134 points by graderjs 4y ago

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.

graderjs 4y ago
That's a cool imagining :) Nice image :)

ethbr0 4y ago

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_construction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Tower#Planning_and_co...

quickthrower2 4y ago
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!
- forinti 4y ago
  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.
  - irrational 4y ago
    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.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      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).
    - spookthesunset 4y ago
      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.
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        Coconuts? Most palms don't.
- frupert52 4y ago
  Those are quite tall palm trees you have there
TobTobXX 4y ago
To save you the lookup: 50 lbs = ~22.5 kg
- doubled112 4y ago
  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.
  - elboru 4y ago
    Mexican near the border here, same.
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    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.
    - tspike 4y ago
      A simple way to think of Fahrenheit is: 0 degrees is just about the coldest a person can stand, and 100 is the hottest.
      - daniel-cussen 4y ago
        Oh yeah it comes from body heat.
- SanderNL 4y ago
  How much is this in micro-Firkins?
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    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
post_break 4y ago
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.
- dhosek 4y ago
  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.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  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.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Use them as roofing on a pergola? Mimic what lots of equatorial cultures do.
Kon-Peki 4y ago
> 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.

Exness199507 4y ago

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

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.

nkrisc 4y ago
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.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  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.
sophacles 4y ago
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.
green-salt 4y ago

WalterBright 4y ago

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

photochemsyn 4y ago
Another phrase for 'survivor bias' is evolution under natural selection.
- OneLeggedCat 4y ago
  Yeah he's not really using the term "survivor bias" in the way that statisticians do.
whyenot 4y ago
...and don't reproduce, and don't pass on their genes to future generations. Natural selection.

sergiotapia 4y ago

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.

daniel-cussen 4y ago
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.

js2 4y ago

A palm tree, speared by a piece of lumber during Hurricane Andrew: https://imgur.com/a/3f77mEa 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/5618154292001/45c576b3-3406-4133-8c92-7ed961410e83/7466ac79-29a8-4772-81ce-37cb747473d0/1280x720/match/image.jpg 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-destruction/2/ 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=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hurricane+andrew+palm+tree&ia=imag...

echoradio 4y ago
> 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.
dylan604 4y ago
>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.

DelaneyM 4y ago

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!

bombcar 4y ago
They're basically the trees from Seuss's The King's Stilts.
dopamean 4y ago
How is your land going to hold up as the neighbors' is eaten away?
- DelaneyM 4y ago
  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.
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    How maddeningly shortsighted!

smm11 4y ago

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.

bush-bby 4y ago

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.