photo by: Derek Redd

Wheeling Park Roads and Grounds crew member Eric Wagner loads chunks of trunk from a fallen tree. Park employees continue to clean up from June’s punishing storms.

WHEELING — Over a month after a storm system demolished trees and downed power lines across the Ohio Valley, cleanup work remains a daily fixture at Wheeling Park.

The mid-June storms devastated many parts of the area, with power outages lasting days and damage to homes and properties. Wheeling Park was no exception, and many wondered if a tornado had touched down in the hilly recreational area, as whole trees were uprooted and toppled.

While most of the park is back up and running, cleanup efforts continue daily, according to Wheeling Park manager Nat Goudy, who said that contractors and cleanup crews were coming to keep up the hard work.

“We’re attacking it every day. We actually have a group going around the park, section by section, and we’re just tackling it,” he said. “… We’re just progressing one day at a time with it.”

Work on the golf course, Goudy said, was still outstanding, both due to the size of the course and the relative sparsity of tree cover meaning the fairways were less affected.

“We haven’t hit the golf course yet, we’ve been concentrating on the bandstand hill, the area around Schwertfeger Shelter, and our exit road.”

Most park activities resumed fairly quickly after the storm, Goudy said, though the first few days involved all-hands-on-deck cleanup work. While Wheeling Park didn’t send any of its employees home, those that showed up to work were given the chance to help begin the first phase of cleanup work – with shoes in the mud and a thick pair of gloves.

“We didn’t call off our staff,” Goudy said, “so whoever we had, we said, we’re going to work, bring gloves. Our day camp staff, that morning, I said, ‘I’m not going to send you home, just start hauling branches down toward the road,’ and that’s what we did. Our grounds crew, we just hauled branches, so instead of spending five days weed whacking and cutting grass, we did that for three days and the other days were just hauling stuff.

“I rolled in a little after 6 in the morning, like, ‘What do we even do here?'” Goudy said, adding that the first day was dedicated to clearing roadways through Wheeling Park and up the hill. “… The following day, we got the lake road open, we were dragging branches off to the side, so as (crews) are going down the road, they can just throw them in the woodchipper and go. It really was a team effort. Everyone came and said, OK, let’s go and get it done. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but no one lost their life.”

A month and a half later, Goudy said the remaining work still to be done will focus on the still standing, but dead, trees. Some tree debris still remains to be dealt with near the entrance to the park, as well, then the golf course.

“It wasn’t as intense as it was on the other side of the park,” he said. “… There’s a lot of work to be done, a lot to clean up and a lot to take down, mainly because it was a lot more spread out. It’s going to take some time.

“Every time the wind blows, we’re out there looking. I hope in a month or so, we’ll be all cleaned up and have removed the trees that are dangerous, the trees that are broken. … We’re getting there. We’re just moving as fast as we can, knocking down the bad trees and moving on. It’s going to be a lengthy process.”