Web posted
Thursday, June 5, 2008
Storms cause damage in Winfield, other areas
By JOSHUA AMES
Courier Staff Writer
High winds and heavy rains pummeled Cowley County Tuesday night leaving a good portion of Winfield with a pile of broken trees and dark houses.
Around 9:30 p.m., a monster of a thunderstorm with variously sized hail, a torrential downpour and winds up to 82 mph hit the city and sent large trees and tree limbs onto houses and vehicles and even blew over a few complete structures.
Winfield residents in all parts of town experienced power outages of varying durations. Some businesses and homes in Winfield were still without power as of this morning.
Brian Stone, director of the Cowley County Emergency Management Department, said the damage is extensive enough to take more action than the county normally would.
"We are going to make a local disaster declaration," said Stone. "It's just a precautionary measure to cover ourselves and let the state know we're in disaster mode right now."
According to Winfield City Manager Warren Porter, entire circuits of power to thousands of residents went down when the storm hit. Porter said that the main focus of the city overnight was to restore the circuits as a start to the overall repairs.
"We experienced total circuits' going out last night, and we haven't completed the work to get all the circuits on in entirety," said Porter this morning. "We still have hundreds of customers who still have no power, and until daylight hit, we had no idea about individual customer issues. Last night, all we could focus on was getting the circuits working."
Porter said that the parts of town with the heaviest damage were areas where there are the most trees. Cleanup crews from Wellington and Arkansas City and a contractor crew from Wichita will be on hand to assist the Winfield city crews in the removal of limbs and fallen trees.
"We've called in other agencies to assist us with this storm," said Porter. "We're working to remove limbs throughout the community and clear the streets."
As of Wednesday morning, Porter said, the city closed the Winfield Aquatic Center indefinitely, due to the possibility of debris damaging the pool's pump system. Island Park will also be closed until fallen limbs and trees are cleared out.
The Winfield Compost Site, located west of the Walnut River and north of W. Ninth Ave. on Broad St., will be open daily Wednesday through Saturday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. for those residents conducting their own cleanups.
The city will also conduct a citywide limb pickup on Monday. The city encourages residents to place discarded limbs on the curb at their residences but to leave access to fire hydrants and gas meters. Vehicles should be parked away from the pickup area. City workers will make a single pass through each neighborhood to collect the limbs.
Throughout the rest of the area, reports of various wind speeds were recorded. In Arkansas City, winds were clocked at 68 mph.
At Strother Field, winds clocked at a stupendous 112 mph blew off a large part of the roof of the Workforce Development building.
Employees at the Winfield branch of Valley Co-op, 811 Mill St., came in to work this morning to find a large part of their landscape missing. According to general manager Rick Kimbrel, two large grain storage units were blown over in the high winds. As of this morning, Kimbrel reported that the Co-op facility was still without power, but he sounded confident about the upcoming harvest.
"We lost two 80,000-bushel grain storage tanks and power as well," Kimbrel said.
Other towns in Cowley County experienced their own share of the brute force of the storm.
Burden City Marshall Travis Lowe said the damage from the storm in Burden is similar to the damage experienced by Winfield residents. One house, located in the 500 block of Chestnut, was reported to have an entire tree inside it.
Todd Mays, Udall city maintenance superintendent, said the city of Udall must have been lucky this time around.
"We had minimal damage up here really," said Mays. "We had some limbs down, but we had no structural or major damage. We missed the brunt of it."
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