WEB: branches down
Casper was hard hit by last week’s early winter storm. The heavy snow felled many branches around the city, causing extensive damage. Assistant Public Services Director for the City of Casper, Peter Meyers, says branch cleanup will likely continue for the next several weeks.
“This was highly unusual. We had a large storm back in 1998 which many people recall as the great tree blow-down storm. People are debating here as to whether this was better or worse than that one. Regardless to say, this is one we’ll be talking about 10 years from now,” Meyers says.
“We’re incurring a lot of overtime costs and we’re also trying to rent a lot of equipment,” Meyers adds. “These are costs that…it’s unfortunate that we have to bear them but the fact is that it’s something we have to do, we have to get the city back and running again, and a lot of that means lots of branch collection and lots of snow collection at this time. We are tracking our costs and we’re hoping for support, but we’ll see how that goes.”
The city has opened additional branch collection sites. Meyers says currently the city is directing people to bring branches to the Mike Sedar Park area.
The branches will be ground into woodchips.