Storm damage at Dongwon

Published 8:02 pm Wednesday, April 1, 2009

The state of Alabama has dealt with bouts of severe weather over the last several days, and it doesn’t look like it’s over yet. More rain is expected possibly today and over into Saturday.

Last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, Crenshaw County took a hit from the severe weather as Dongwon lost part of its roof, according to Crenshaw County EMA Director Jessica Tomlin-Seabrook. Also, the auto supplier plant had a trailer to be turned over by the storm, but the trailer was not attached to a truck.

“We had two or three chicken houses that lost some sheets of tin off of them,” Tomlin-Seabrook said, “and in Highland Home, we had a tree to land on the front portion of a house on Wilson Road.”

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Tomlin-Seabrook said that numerous trees were knocked down during that three-day time frame all over the county, but mainly in the north and south-end of the county.

“The National Weather Service has said it was due to straight-line winds, not tornadoes,” she said.

No reports of damage were turned in to the EMA office for the central part of the county.

Also during the storms, the EMA office discovered that the outside weather warning sirens at Pleasant Home and Fullers Crossroads were not working.

“The siren maintenance crew has been notified and is scheduled to repair the problems,” she said. “All of the sirens were working during the last live siren testing.”

Live siren testing is done on the first Tuesday of every month at 10 a.m.

Crenshaw County has seen 9.29 inches of rain fall as of March 31, for the month of March, according to Tomlin-Seabrook.

“We got six inches of rain in the last three days,” she said. “But I have received some reports of as much as 11 inches in the southern end of the county.”

Crenshaw County is presently set up where the EMA director can sound the sirens in the north end of the county only, the south end, or the central part, according to where the severe weather is located. “Montgomery County has been talking about going to the coordinated siren system, which is what we already have, so I feel we are ahead of the game,” Tomlin-Seabrook said.

Even though the county is among the eleven counties placed under Gov. Bob Riley’s State of Emergency, no major highway or road damage resulted from last weekend’s storms, according to County Engineer Benjie Sanders.

“Ours has been more of a maintenance type of work, but no major road damage,” Sanders said.

“Residents are reminded to get a NOAA Weather radio because we can’t always depend on the outside weather warning systems,” Tomlin-Seabrook said. “These can be purchased at Piggly Wiggly or Lisa’s Radio Shack in Luverne.”