Storm causes tree damage in Crawford County

An early morning thunderstorm created an unusual situation for officials on call at the Crawford County Law Enforcement Center. The storm hit around sunrise and city street commissioner Dave Nemitz says he got a call around 6 A.M. from the police department dispatcher. He was already out, and the dispatcher told him a big branch had fallen off a tree out front of the police department, in the storm’s wind gusts of 30 mph or more. The branch had been twisted before “and was just kind of limbo-ing on the structure of the tree,” he says, till it came down in today’s wind. The huge limb landed near the edge of a parking area that’s used by law enforcement center employees and visitors, but fortunately no cars were parked within the immediate area when the incident occurred. Nemitz says public works officials must now decide what to do with the damaged tree. He says they may have to chop down the whole tree, Nemitz says public works officials did not receive any additional reports of storm-related damage from within the community.