Cleanup following Wednesday night’s severe thunderstorm that blew through Sheboygan County with winds that, arguably, may have reached hurricane force, could easily take until sometime in July.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says that softwood trees will uproot in winds between 73 and 112 mile per hour. The hardwood maples that dominated the trees downed especially on Sheboygan’s north side must have experiences something akin to that. Formal analysis will need to come from NOAA experts, but following up on the damage falls in the lap of Sheboygan Director of Public Works David Bieble, who spoke with WHBL News at Noon on Thursday following the storm. His assessment of damage was quite revealing of the scope of the impact.
“Well, as we’re speaking as of noon today, June 16, we still have 19 trees that are fully blocking city street and roads and are being removed. We have an additional 20 trees that are blocking residential drive ways…there are 35 trees on homes, 16 trees on cars, and about 234 different locations where there’s tree-damage branches or cleanup, that has been identified with already 70 of those locations already cleaned up. So it’s extensive; it was city-wide, however it would seem to be concentrated a little bit more on the north side with the damage in terms of the amount of trees in a certain area.”
The last significant weather disaster to strike the City of Sheboygan was the so-called “Flood of ‘98” which dumped over 10 inches of rain on the city in a few hours of the morning of August 6, 1998, wiping out homes and even entire neighborhoods.
Comparisons were made, but as Biebel noted: “Well, I would say a completely different event. The flood of ‘98 was just…that was so devastating, not only just with the response, but the cleanup after in the homes. That took months to clean up.”
The current situation won’t take months according to Biebel, but “This is going to be, quite frankly, it’s going to take us weeks…and maybe a month to get at least everything cleaned up off the terraces and roads in terms of some of the branches. We’re going to focus…right now on opening the streets to traffic. What that means that we’re going to cut it up, chunk it up, and maybe just push a lot of the larger stumps and branches off to the side to at least get the road open, and then next we’ll get the driveways and some of that opened up as well as the trees off of vehicles, and then finally we’re going to focus on the trees on the houses which is much more particular and much more, what I would say a little bit more “lengthy in process” because of the care and nature of removing that from the property. In other words, to try to reduce as much damage as possible in the removal process as well.”
Biebel said that many of the phone calls he’s receiving are notifying of hanging branches and such that can pose a danger. But many others involve private property which, he said, require a private contractor to address. The DPW will instead be working on the public trees and the trees that are in the right-of-way, such as the sidewalk area and driveways. And he also urged homeowners to not try to help city crews clear streets on their own – to “please allow us to do our work”, and to hand their private tree removals to the experts due to the dangers that are involved.
As for applying for possible emergency declaration, Biebel said: “Not yet – we’re assessing everything, we’re tracking everything, I have an email that I’m drafting to Steve Steinhardt from County Emergency Management and we will be, probably, yes, documenting and forwarding this on as to get disaster assistance. I have not had the time to do that yet but I’m hoping by the end the day at least we can do that initial paperwork and inquiry to get that started.”
In one hopeful sign of normalcy, when asked if the DPW was in an “all-hands-on-deck” mode, Biebel said: “For the most part, yes. Except we’re still collecting garbage and recycling. That’s still operational. But mainly our Streets and Sanitation crew is assisting the Parks and Forestry crew, so we’re out there, our street sweepers are following up after…there’s lots of debris on the street, so anywhere we clean up with the chainsaw dust with the branches and leaves, we’re cleaning up as much as we can following behind that as well.” That cleanup, as he said earlier, could take weeks – or maybe even a month – to complete.
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