The clean up from last week’s storm damage continues in Iowa City. Public Works Director Rick Fosse says lots of people have chipped in. Fosse says the clean up is “going well, we’re actually ahead of where we’d expect to be at this point.” He says a combination of city, county and state staff are working on the effort and their first priority was to get the streets back open.
Fosse says they are faced with removing downed trees and parts of damaged buildings.
He says they’re asking people to separate the tree debris from the building debris, as the building debris will be taken to the landfill and the tree debris will be chipped into compost.
Fosse can’t say how many loads of debris there are. He says it’s difficult to estimate as they have three large piles of tree debris, and “many, many tons” of building debris that have gone into the landfill. Fosse says they’re working to get life back to normal in the areas hit hard by the tornado.
Fosse says they hope to have the traffic signals up and running on the Burlington Street corridor in the next two to three days. He says they hope to have the majority of debris clean up by the end of next week, but he says people will still be working on their individual back yards through the summer.
Fosse says they have had a chance to get an estimate of the cost of the damage. He says the preliminary estimate of damage to public buildings and infrastructure is four-million dollars. Fosse says they have good insurance, but will also look to get federal help in paying for the damage.