Homeowners clean up after Thursday’s blow

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By Dustin Lemmon and Kurt Allemeier | Saturday, June 09, 2007 |

Property owner Myron Swanson, center looks over the damage the roof a home on Glaspell St. caused by a tree blown down during Thursday night?s storm. Jay Hoth of Swanson Construction works on repairing rafters that were crushed by the tree falling on the house.Photo by Kevin E.Schmidt

About 50 people were busy Friday morning on the Dan and Peg Claussen farm in north Bettendorf, all of them helping the couple clean up extensive damage left by Thursday night’s windstorm.

Some were hauling away downed branches while others were cleaning up metal siding torn from out buildings by the high winds. The house is just north of Interstate 80 in the 6000 block of Indiana Avenue.

“Rural areas always have lots of friends and neighbors willing to help,” Peg Claussen said with a smile.

The storm knocked out a second-story window in the Claussens’ house and damaged their roof. The American Red Cross of the Quad-Cities offered them temporary housing, but the couple planned to stay with relatives while making repairs.

Dan Claussen said he and his wife were at their granddaughter’s soccer game in Muscatine, Iowa, when the storm hit. They received a call from their 18-year-old grandson who was in the house at the time and had to seek shelter in the basement.

“He could hear things really banging around and then it got real quiet,” Dan Claussen said.

The Claussens could tell they had some storm damage when they arrived home, but the full extent of it was not visible until daybreak.

In addition to the damage to the house, the Claussens lost a shed, and a barn also sustained damage.

Allan Urlis, a spokesman for MidAmerican Energy Co., said 18,200 customers were without electricity by the end of Thursday night, mostly in Scott County, but also in the Illinois counties of Mercer, Rock Island and Henry.

By Friday morning 3,670 customers had their energy restored by Friday morning, he said. By about 10 p.m. Friday, about 1,200 customers were still without power, all of them in Davenport and most of them on the city’s west side.

“We expect to get our system back up by about midnight,” Urlis said late Friday. “But about 500-600 customers will remain without power because they need to get a private electrician to make repairs to their house’s meter boxes and connection posts before we can re-energize their home.

“We had everybody out there working that we could, about 150 people all day,” he said. “We’ll keep a full complement out there until we get this all done, and keep people on duty so that as customers get repairs to their homes and businesses done we can re-energize right away.”

The Davenport Fire Department had 78 calls for lines down or to investigate hazardous conditions between 9 p.m. Thursday and 9 a.m. Friday.

Some Davenport residents were victims of wind damage as well.

Jeff Jager conducted part of the symphony of chain saws ringing through west Davenport as residents cleaned up in the aftermath of the fast-moving storm.

Jager and his wife, Kim, supervised the cleanup of a huge tree uprooted in their front yard on Rolff Street. The tree, which was left horizontal and filled their front yard, grazed the roof of their house and did less damage than it could have to vehicles parked on the street.

“We got lucky, I think,” he said. “It couldn’t have landed in a better place.”

“It is like the wind just picked it up and laid it down,” his wife added.

No one was at the Jagers’ home when the storm hit, leaving an upsetting surprise when they got home. Kim was the first to see the damage.

“I’m sure it made quite a thud when it hit the ground,” Jeff added.

The storm created a sense of community that is often lacking, she said. After the storm whipped through, taking electricity to many homes with it, residents came outside to gawk at the damage and make sure their neighbors were OK.

A few blocks away, behind his house on Glaspell Street, Tom Williams also was at work with a chain saw, cutting up branches. He and his wife, Dawn, were not home when the storm hit. They came back to discover the power was out, but could not tell much more.

“We didn’t realize the extent of the damage until daylight today,” he said.

The wind snapped a pole with a transformer on it behind their house, and a branch took down a line running to their house, he said. He looked around at the branches in yards and at nearby trees with their tops snapped off or broken in half and wondered what caused all the damage.

“It was more than 60-mph wind that did this,” he said.

Across the street, large branches filled Don Murrow’s yard. One branch his wife had been wanting him to trim came down and grazed the gutter on the house.

He was amazed by the storm’s power.

“It sounded like a hurricane coming,” he added.

He also was amazed by the lack of damage to his house. That took until morning to realize.

“We assumed that nothing was hit, so we got lucky, I think,” he said. “I’m not so sad about the trees being down as I am the power being out.”

Leslie Anthony of the American Red Cross of the Quad-Cities, said the agency is providing temporary housing for at least three nights to some people whose homes were damaged Thursday.

(Reporter Thomas Geyer contributed to this story.)

Dustin Lemmon can be contacted at (563) 383-2493 or dlemmon@qctimes.com.

Kurt Allemeier can be contacted at (563) 383-2360 or kallemeier@qctimes.com.

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