Fallen Tree

Yesterday was very heavy rain and very windy during the evening and night the wind grew stronger and we fully expected to lose out electricity supplies; we knew that a number of trees nearby were likely to fall.  This morning the wind had dropped to a light breeze and the sky was blue, so I walked down to our pharmacy to pick up my medicines.  Along our lane I came across two fallen trees, the largest with a trunk about thirty feet high had fallen along the verge so that it was not blocking the road, but only our local footpath.  The smaller tree further up the lane had fallen at right angles to the verge and across the road, so that it was blocking the road, but with care could be passed by driving well onto the verge on the opposite side of the road.  This is a picture of this tree, which is actually much larger than it looks in the picture.  

During the night and prior to my walking down the road our electricity supply had stood up well, however, almost as soon as I left the house, the electricity went off.  Since it was still bright and sunny I went over to my small workshop where our generator resides and was not working and diagnosed the fault, which was failure of the fuel shut-off solenoid so that no fuel could reach the diesel engine.  Although I have not fixed this fault, it is possible to manually override this feature by operating a small lever, so the generator is now once again operational, but needs to be manually stopped.  I suspect that the solenoid is fine and a wire has pulled off from the control box, due to the failure of its anti-vibration mounts, either way I now know that I can fix it properly at some future time, but use the generator if the power goes off again.