Minor problems reported in area
Published 12:00 am Thursday, September 9, 2004
While Hurricane Frances may have taken her toll on parts of Florida, Alabama remained relatively safe.
Aside form rainy weather and fallen trees Greenville and Butler County avoided the sting of Frances completely.
Butler County Emergency planner Bob Luman said the weekend went just as had been predicted.
"It went about like we figured it would," said Luman. "There were no major problems other than some trees falling down."
Luman said there were very few instances of trees coming down.
"I think there were only about three or four that went down," said Luman. "There may have been more, but that's all we had reported."
Street department supervisor Milton Luckie said his department also had an uneventful weekend.
"We didn't really get a lot of calls out," said Luckie. "I think we only had about four trees down and that's it."
Terry Wilhite, of Pioneer Electric said he didn't notice a large amount of problems either.
"I didn't see problems in our area, but I saw city crews out this morning," said Wilhite. "Also at the Intersection of College/Fort Dale there were police directing traffic."
Luckie said Butler County was very fortunate during all the bad weather.
"We were really lucky around here," said Luckie. "The only real problem we had was a tree that went down on Highway 10. It went down on some lines around 12 p.m., but we got it taken care of and the lights were back on by about 1:30 p.m."
While Greenville had expected a large number of people to come in fleeing the hurricane the streets stayed fairly empty.
"We didn't really hear about a lot of people coming into town," said Luman. "As far as we are concerned everything went very smoothly."
Luckie said the storm had not become the hot topic of conversation it had been expected to be.
"We really didn't have much to talk about which made us happy," said Luckie. "We were very well prepared for it though."
Wilhite said his crew was also prepared for the storm though they didn't see much damage.
"As for us … We had spotted outages Monday and during the early morning hours of Tuesday," said Wilhite.
"Mainly from limbs being hurled onto powerlines. We are very fortunate to have missed the brunt of this storm, but we were ready had it chose us as its path."
Though Frances has moved on, there are other storms looming in the Gulf. Luman said it would be important to see what happened with the following storms.
"Our next step is to wait and see what will happen with the next storms," said Luman. "It looks like it may be headed for the Gulf. We will just have to wait and see. It will probably be Sunday or Monday until we know much about it. We just have to wait and see."
During the storm many power companies have sent workers to Florida as relief workers. Wilhite said Pioneer would join them in the relief effort.
"Pioneer will be sending a construction crew to Florida," said Wilhite.
"Darren Bryan, Tommy Powell, Johnny Taylor (all from Greenville) and
Will Roberts and Britt Adams (from Selma) will be leaving Wednesday morning, going to Clay Electric Cooperative, a 130,000 member
co-op. All but 30,000 are without power. The men will be going to Keystone Heights, Fla., about a 10 hour drive on bucket trucks."