Den Socling

This has been in my head for months and I keep thinking of information to add. The canopy was rotated at least 180 degrees. The solar panel that had been at the left ended up on the right. So from the picnic table being upside down showing that the canopy was lifted plus rotated, what could do that?

I have many more pictures that I may add if there is a need. Right now I'd like to mention another discussion. I belong to a Miata forum and they have an "off topic" area like most. I started a discussion there. A guy named Ted offered this. The term "dust devil" isn't much used in the eastern US because it's something that happens mainly on open arid land with intense solar exposure. Microburst is closer but incomplete because it refers specifically to a small focused downdraft. I don't know if there's a term other than the broad "waterspout" for a mini tornado that follows streams but I've seen them. They wobble and sometimes flick up onto the banks briefly before dissipating or returning to water. And little twisters (dust devils where it isn't very dusty) happen. In the 1970s I was working at a manufactured housing plant in North Carolina when one touched the holding yard. A doublewide half sitting on tires & hitch was tipped over while a big unbound stack of 2x4s right beside it was undisturbed Ted's suggestion was that a little twister came off the warm water of the creek and traveled up the ramp and destroyed the canopy. Meanwhile, there is a meteorologist there that says that it is not possible that wind did this damage. I don't know what you saw, but your description doesn't match the the atmospheric physics that would be at work here. Yes, you need a thermal differential to form a devil, but Rocky mountain stream temperature would be very cold before a "sharp cold front", say 40F. Even if a cold front was 20F, and you had a 20 degree differential, and it persisted long enough to possibly form a vertical column of air: the horizontal wind speed associated with the sharp cold front would be very high and too strong to enable the vertical updraft due to a thermal differential to form/maintain itself. Plus, the speed of stream water would also dampen any vertical updraft over the stream. It would carry the base of the vertical column of rising air, down stream, stretching it out of shape to its death. But let's say in this case, a creek-devil did form. That the temperature differential between water and air was high enough to create an updraft. Plus, the motion of the water was weak enough to not stretch the column of air. Plus the motion of the air was strong enough to move the creek-devil on shore to the campground canopy/picnic table. This creek-devil (surface based and not dropping down from a cloud on this sunny day) would then need to be large enough to destroy the canopy AND lift/flip the large heavy table yet not displace the the items under the canopy. Recall, OP said they were still in place. Being the lightest items in the destruction zone they should have been thrown to the far corners of the earth had wind (horizontal or rotational) been at work here. (Google Beaufort wind scale for empirical effects due to wind speed). Two things make this operational/research meteorologist think this was not a wind driven event:No displacement of items under the canopy despite canopy destruction and table movement.No indication of weather according to OP to cause a wind event: sunny, not windy, not stormy. So the meteorologist says that it had to be vandals. Looking at the destruction and the fact that it happened in my front yard in the middle of the day makes it impossible for me to believe that vanals are even a remote possibility. Does anybody have any idea about what happened?

The material of the cover is 3-layer polyethylene with rip-stop in the middle. It was torn from end to end along the ridge. The poles were 1.375" steel. I put the white tape at the joints when I was setting it up to keep them from coming apart again. Almost all ended up bent. The second picture shows one of our get-togethers and the positions of the poles.

Now here is where things start to get weird. The picnic table is 8' of treated lumber and must weigh 100 lbs. I have always had a rope from the ridge down to the table. The table ended upside down. Thirty or 40 feet away, a Kevlar canoe was sitting and it never moved. One of the "feet" from the bottom of a pole was still sitting very nearly where it started. It looked like the canopy went straight up. And stuff that was under the canopy was largely untouched.

As you can see in the first picture, the canopy is right in front of you as you go down the driveway. In the satellite image, the arrow points to the canopy. I was in my office at the VacDry kilns building. To the left off my Miata is a ramp down to the creek. Our location is 41.2020'N,77.2644'W Now lets look at what Patti found when she got home from shopping.

Let's try this again. I looked for the method of inserting an image and lost my last introduction. Here is a little bit about myself. I'm a 68 year old grandfather. I am the president of PCS VacDry. I had one course of meteorology in college. A small river named Pine Creek runs through our front yard. We have had canopies there for 30 years. I have had them tied down thoroughly and never lost one to wind. This happened last fall. It was a clear, sunny and "crisp" day. I don't know what the temperature was. Right after lunch, my wife went out to do some shopping. When she returned an hour or so later, she found the canopy totally destroyed. Here are pictures to show you what I'm talking about.