Warren County is still digging out from under Wednesday night’s storm that hit the area swiftly and left numerous trees down across the county.
“I’m glad the storm didn’t last any longer than it did,” said Road Superintendent Levie Glenn. “It did enough damage in the very short time that it lasted. We had a bunch of trees down. Most of them were in the Dibrell and Eastside areas. Some were in Irving College and a few around Morrison. Nothing much in the Centertown area and Lucky area.”
A Highway Department crew of 10 worked from 5 to 9:30 p.m. Wednesday night to clear the roadways of fallen trees.
Glenn says more calls were received Thursday morning of fallen trees blocking the roadways.
“We had four to five calls this morning with more trees blocking the road,” he said Thursday. “We got those roads open first. We had several big trees and a lot of Bradford Pear trees down. Today, we are cleaning up. We’re removing what we cut last night to get the roads back open and removing any debris from the roadway we find as we go.”
Some of the trees that fell during the storm struck utility lines.
“We had to work with utilities in the areas where the tree struck telephone lines and electrical lines,” said Glenn. “We had to wait for them to come and get the lines free. We don’t want to touch anything that’s lying on a line for safety reasons.”
According to McMinnville Public Works assistant director Brad Hennessee, the city had less than five trees down.
“We are still getting calls coming in,” said Hennessee. “We knew about four last night – at the Blue Building on South High Street, on Fallen Street, on Bybee Branch Road, and we’ve been asked to look at one on Sunset Drive. We got everything out of the roadway last night. The one at the Blue Building we pushed back onto Blue Building property because it was blocking one side of the street. We waited to cut it up because the one at Fallen Street had electricity out so we wanted to remove that one first.”
Straight-line winds are being blamed for the damage.