Rough Wisconsin Winter

It is awesome nobody got hurt, and also good your stuff didn't get damaged.

Sorry for your loss!  My brother & I lost a shed 5 years ago to a big snowstorm.  It's a mess to clean up.  Glad you had minimal damage to contents.

Glad the damage to tractors was minimal, and that no one wsa hurt. I heard about the fire station collapse also. Most stores up in Northern WI have been sold out of roof rakes for the past month

Glad the only loss is the shed Ken.  Even that is hard enough to take, but as you say, it could have been worse.  Just glad no one was hurt or worse.

Sorry to here about your loss. Last weekend in Chippewa Falls, we raked of the north side of our shed. I did start the tractors last Friday morning/afternoon, and let them run for about 1 hour. It warmed the shed's roof - south side, enough that by 5 p.m., the whole southside's snow slide off the roof. There was just enough heat inside and the late morning/early afternoon sun the metal was warmed. The sliding snow sounded like a thunderstorm.

Glad to hear your collection was saved with minimal damage.

Edited by Randy_Larson - 12 Mar 2019 at 9:23pm

My daughter Lives in Eua Clair Wisconsin. told me about setting the all time amount of snow for one month in Febuary, over 4 foot she said.

Farm buildings are frequently at-risk of winter damage for several reasons... and they're secretly hidden in all the notes above:

Snow load... when designing a building, we calculate 'snow load' by figuring out how many inches of snow to expect atop the building, and figure the weight of it on a per-square-foot basis, then we figure out how much surface area the roof has.  I think the standard for Iowa is 20 to 40lbs/sqft.... that's basically 3-4 gallons of water.  Wisconsin's snow load is higher by at least another gallon.  You'd think that snow wouldn't be that heavy, but after you've had a good snow, and it's packed down, more arrives, and it just keeps coming.  One gallon of water weighs 8lbs, and one gallon's volume comes to 231 cubic inches.  Take a square foot area (144 sq in) and just two inches thick, you've got 288ci... that's over a gallon.  Six inches of ice is enough to put you within limits of a 20lb/sqft roof rating.

Farm buildings usually don't shed snow like a house... because the house is heated... it looses heat through the roof, which helps reduce snow load by melting it off.  If it's heated steel, that works to advantage- the snow will slide off as soon as it gets melted from beneath.

Farm buildings that aren't heated, have to deal with other structural issues.  Moisture within nailed wood causes expansion, and hence, nails to be backed out or broken off... and the wood is weakened.  Expansion of soil beneath post bases, or soil gripping and lifting the posts, stresses already weakened joints.  High winds working on all those surfaces are the coup-de-grace.

You may have heard banging and shuddering on fast-freezing nights... they're called cryoseisms... aka 'ice quakes'... soil expanding rapidly as it freezes, bumping buildings, shaking foundations.  Check your basements for new cracks and signs of shifting and settlement... this was a tough winter. 

And we'll be bone dry by the end of June.

Those two tractors are his snow fighters.  The WD has a blade on the loader and the D17 diesel probably has a snow blower on the back and using suit-case weights and a B wheel center(?) for counter-balance.