People in Gustavus Township still cleaning up three days after storms rolled through

Some communities are still feeling the effects of Tuesday night's storm. The northern parts of Trumbull County were hit hard. Gustavus Township saw some of the worst damage. 

“It was the worst one I've seen,” Jeff Betts, a Gustavus Township Trustee said about the storm. “It was wild, the wind was crazy, it was coming down in sheets. My yard was flooded in a matter of 15 minutes.”

Dozens of trees were uprooted in the high winds and were still down on Friday. 

“We had straight line winds going this way with rain and we watched the tree at the corner go half over,” Amy Dick, who Lives in Gustavus Township, said about the storms. 

Dick has an old tree in her front yard. She and her husband recently noticed it was splitting down the middle and were thinking of ways they could save it. But Tuesday's storm snapped the trunk right in half causing the top to fall on some power lines. 

Ohio Department of Transportation crews were out with chainsaws and wood chippers clearing that tree for hours Friday morning. 

The townships cemetery also has some damaged tombstones after several trees toppled over there. Some of the trustees took their chainsaws and trucks to the park next door to break down fallen branches. The park has a pavilion that many people rent out each weekend in the summertime. Betts was working to get it cleared of all debris so it can still be used this weekend. 

Majority of the area lost power Tuesday night. As of Friday afternoon First Energy reported that Gustavus had the most outages with 86 customers waiting for power to come back on. 

“We’ve got the generator so we’ve got the refrigerator and the freezer hooked up to that so we won’t lose our food. We've got a gas grill so we can cook that way,” Dick said. 

The energy company is estimating the outages to last until Saturday at 11 p.m. at the latest. The township was not offering any charging or shelter stations for people without power to go to. Betts said they’ve previously applied for grants to get some emergency generators and supplies so they could offer those but that was denied. 

“Something like this would happen in the winter with an ice storm or something so we could have that maybe at the town hall for people to come if they didn’t have heat or anything but that didn’t get put through,” Betts said. 

Damage to homes was minor but with so many trees down Betts said it could take weeks to get everything cleared. The township doesn’t have an official clean up crew so the trustees have been putting in a lot of the work along with firefighters and volunteers.

“There's a lot of good people out here, farmers, hard working men brought up for generations doing that and helping the community and everybody’s jumped in,” Betts said. “You don’t even have to call they just come out and do what they can.”