Feature Article September 11, 2002
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Storm clean up is underwayby David Brison The damage caused by the high straight-line winds that danced through the Cloyne area early in the morning of August 2, toppling trees that were four feet in diameter but leaving other nearby areas untouched, is being slowly cleaned up. Trees have been taken off homes. For the most part, branches, small limbs and other debris around homes have been raked into piles waiting for someone to chip them or truck them away. Gaping holes in roofs have been temporarily waterproofed with tar and tarps until a contractor can provide a more permanent solution.
Home owners have learned what is covered by their insurance policies and what isnt, namely, that the insurance will pay to have trees taken off structures (houses, cabins, sheds, and trailers) but once the tree is on the ground, the homeowner has to pay to have it hauled away or cut up.
Structural damage to homes and other buildings is covered by insurance. Everyone that I talked to in the aftermath of the storm reported that insurance adjusters were on the scene immediately. However, more serious structural damage often has to be assessed again and then, before work has started, it is usually necessary to get more than one estimate from contractors.Many trees went down in the bush near homes and in more isolated areas. Clean up of these trees is proceeding very slowly. Pine trees lose value if they are left on the ground too long. Worms get between the bark and the wood and the wood turns blue. Owners, and loggers who are doing the work for them, will lose thousands of dollars if the wood sits on the ground much longer.
Gilles Paquet is one of the local loggers who has been working full out since the storm. By nightfall on Friday, he had just completed taking out all of the fallen and topped trees from the area owned by the municipality, next to the museum in Cloyne. The once tightly packed stand of old pines is now an open lot. Paquet says that the pines are still top grade logs only small parts of the logs near the place where they have broken off have turned blue.
Artist Ursula Ossenberg, who lives and has her studio in the sub-division in behind the museum, had the top of a pine in her front yard fall on her house. When The News visited on Friday, workers had just put on a new roof (one of the few people we visited who had work of this nature completed). The tree that was topped is leaning towards her house and she has been in touch with Coleman Boomhour, a local tree specialist, who will remove the tree by cutting and lowering limbs to the ground and then cutting from the top down in sections. This work has to be done at Ursulas expense removing the treetop from her roof, and repairs to the roof were covered by insurance. Ursula owns a bush lot down the road which is a solid mass of tangled trees. She will eventually have this cleaned up but it takes a back seat now to other more pressing concerns.
We were lucky that there wasnt even more damage caused by the storm that there was only the one death [Cloyne resident Benjamin Strong] and only one other serious injury [11 year-old Erika Brennan], said Ursula. However Ursula, like many others that we talked to, says she still has a panic reaction to thunderstorms and high winds.
Mo McFadden, the co-owner of Cloyne Village Foods, also lives in the sub-division. A large tree fell on his home causing serious structural damage. Work has not yet started to repair that damage. However, Mo reports that the landmark oversized lawn chair, that sits in front of the store and was demolished in the storm, will be repaired. The Lions Club is planning a special dedication to a storm victim.
From
(L to R) - Gilles La Rochel, Marius Lavoie, and Gilles Paquet. The men
are standing in front of one of the last truck loads of pine from the
stand next to the museum in Cloyne.
Editor's note: we
plan a follow up story on the effect of the storm on some of the badly
hitresorts in the area.
