Sorry to hear about that.
Is there some lesson to be learned, or knowledge to be gained for guidance for the future?
Sure, the dish could be taken down when there is an expectation of bad weather. What else?
How windy was it?
In Southern California and Baja we also had some very fierce wind gusts monday evening (90 km/hr for something like 3 hours in some parts and above 45 km/hr for more than 12 straight hours :s), we hadn't experience something like it since 1994 when a hurricane penetrated the California Gulf (or Sea of Cortéz) and brought us nothing but headaches.
Since then i always had trees flanking my antennae, one big sturdy tree on the west, and one big sturdy tree in the east... but since we had not experienced this kind of winds since 15 years ago, i decided to trim them... OH NOOO, ERROR!! hahahaha the wind knocked down two of my offset dishes, the wind destroyed a couple of my neighboors roof and pieces of wood flew directly to one of my prime focus dishes, nothing bad happened but i tought it was going to destroy my LNBF, the power went out for more than 12 hours, i ended up with only a broken window, two offset dented, two trees were brought down by the wind
.
What did i learnt? never again i'll trim my trees in this time of the year!
I felt secure doing it because i know big storms hit the California coast every 20 to 25 years, well... MAJOR storms, the last one was in 1994 with a major event in 1996, the one before that was in 1977, the one before it was in the 1950's with one in the mid 1960's... so even if we have at least one or two years before it hits us, there's always the possibility that one unexpected event may happen.
I should've known better, i was monitoring the NOAA data, doing calculations about wind speed and it was clear it would hit us but i tought we were safe
.
Cheers
M.