HEIDI TOTH - Daily Herald | Posted: Wednesday, August 2, 2006 11:00 pm
The 12-minute supercell storm that hit Provo on Tuesday inflicted more than $13 million in damage, according to the city's preliminary assessment released Wednesday.
"It's more than a million dollars a minute," Provo Mayor Lewis Billings said.
That's a conservative estimate for the value of the property damage; he expects that number to rise as experts have more time to evaluate just how much damage was inflicted by the gale-force winds, rain and hail that pounded the city.
The situation is severe enough that the city on Tuesday filed a disaster declaration with Utah County seeking assistance with the cleanup. The county agreed and filed its own declaration with the state; the two entities are meeting with Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. this morning to discuss the situation.
The damage includes $1.75 million to public property at the Provo Airport, $1.3 million to the power grid, $1.2 million to trees and facilities at public parks and $375,000 to other facilities. Damage to private facilities was estimated at $1 million to $3 million at the airport and $5 million to $8 million citywide.
"We believe that will go up," Billings said.
Included in that damage is Arthur Little's house in southwest Provo, considered a total loss by the city. Three giant cottonwood trees in his backyard came down on top of his house, destroying parts of the roof, ripping up his backyard and damaging the structural integrity of the building.
He was actually on vacation Tuesday and on his way back when he got the first inkling that something was wrong.
"About the time I hit Vegas I started getting phone calls," he said; the Provo resident's house is one of two the city has deemed uninhabitable, so friends, seeing his house on the news, started calling.
Day two found most of the affected residents returning to their homes to do cleanup, trying to stay cool in the heat without electricity, checking on their neighbors and waiting for the insurance adjusters. The neighborhoods south of Center Street and west of Interstate 15 sustained the most damage, along with the Provo Airport. About 300 customers were still without power Wednesday evening, down from 8,500 immediately after the storm blew through. Billings said the city's goal is to have all customers back online by midnight.
"Now we're into that group of residents where it will be more challenging because of the damage to transmission and distribution lines," said city spokeswoman Raylene Ireland.
Nineteen work crews from Provo, several neighboring cities and Rocky Mountain Power worked continuously to remove and replace the 45 damaged power poles; almost half had been replaced by Wednesday. Billings said the crews included retired workers and those pulled in early from vacations, as well as public works employees able to dig holes and facilitate the process in other ways.
"We're going to do in two days what normally would take weeks and weeks to accomplish," he said.
A few people also were without phone service after 60 telephone poles were knocked down. Bob Gravely, a spokesman for Qwest, said about 50 customers, most of whom live in Springville, were disconnected when the power poles that included the telephone lines came down. They will be out of service until the end of today, he said, when the poles are back up and the company can re-install the phone lines.
About 100 iProvo customers reported having problems with their Internet connection, said Mary DeLaMare-Schaefer, the marketing and customer relations manager for Provo city energy. Others also had minor connection problems when switching from generator power back onto city power. Ireland said at one point on Tuesday all of iProvo was down, but no problems had been brought to her attention. Other city services haven't been affected.
No problems have been reported to Questar Gas.
The other major damage point for the city was the airport, where nine aircraft and 13 buildings sustained significant damage. The damage assessment started there at 7 a.m. Wednesday with city and state officials. Airport manager Steve Gleason said when they heard the storm was coming they made sure all the aircraft were in, then went inside and closed the doors. It didn't do them much good.
"It just kept getting more and more and more intense until it blew our roof off," he said.
Minus an office, he spent the day assessing the damage, using his cell phone as a mobile office and contemplating the winds that swept through. He's seen some inclement weather, but never like Tuesday's storm, he said; historically the roofs have stayed on the buildings.
"This is the first time that we sort of had a direct hit from the weather," Gleason said. "The weather station only records wind speeds up to 92 mph, and it recorded just at 92 mph, so we're sure it got well above that."
The storm moved through so quickly that just a few minutes after it tore up the airport, a jet landed without any difficulty. Night operations were shut down Tuesday night because the airport couldn't get enough generators, but that's been solved and all operations should be back to normal, he said.
Mario Markides, the associate chairman of the aviation science department at Utah Valley State College, said the program lost two airplanes when the wind broke the tie-downs and flipped them over, and had some structural damage to the building. Classes may be moved to the main campus in Orem until electricity comes back on, and flying should resume today. Three-fourths of the program's planes have been inspected and are completely damage-free, he said.
The next big question is how to pay for it. Huntsman was in Provo on Tuesday evening to survey the damage and he pledged state support; now that both Provo and Utah County have made disaster declarations, state and federal money is available, Billings said. The city is looking into financial support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the airport may get help from the Federal Aviation Administration. The county is contributing some equipment to help with the cleanup process, and neighboring cities have contributed help as well, although Billings said Provo will compensate those municipalities for workers' time and resources.
Some of the city's losses will be covered by insurance as well, although identifying funding sources will largely start today while meeting with the governor.
Little's not concerned yet with how to pay for it, but he was concerned with getting his insurance adjuster to his house quickly before the thousands of pounds of tree did even more damage. The three trees, all at least 60 feet tall, had been blown over, roots and all, and the massive root system was standing straight up in his backyard with the remnants of his fence. Much of the roof was destroyed, a storage shed was completely gone and a bike that had been on the back porch was in his neighbor's apple tree. His garden was almost completely destroyed, with the vegetables either torn up out of the ground or pock-marked by hail. Water had collected in the fluorescent light fixtures in his kitchen and a branch was poking through his bathroom wall.
"That's not even my planter," he said, gesturing at some of the debris that ended up in his yard.
He was waiting for an official opinion on the inside of the house, but in walkthroughs he had noticed plenty of damage.
"You can tell just by the way things are settling, it's got some stress," he said.
The house that used to share a back fence with him, and that now has a gaping hole in the backyard, was the other house city inspectors declared uninhabitable, which does not mean the homes are condemned, Ireland said.
"What has happened is we have sent out city inspectors to make a determination of whether the home is considered uninhabitable," she said; the city's objective is then to walk through the home with the homeowner and discuss concerns and options.
The second home, in which Jared and Rachel Cornett lived, didn't have any noticeable problems like power poles or trees on top of it. A neighbor said the wind almost seemed to pick the roof up and throw it back on, knocking insulation, drywall and other pieces of the house onto Rachel Cornett and her mother-in-law.
"Everything fell, and it almost fell on top of them," said Calvin Herrin, who lives across the street.
Most of the people in that neighborhood still had power, but a couple of blocks west of them the houses were dark. Kayelyn Robinson was one of those; her family lives on the west side of 500 West at about 1600 South. They had a generator to keep their fridge and their neighbors' fridges running, but oil lamps and candles lighted the house and they were eating a lot of cold cereal and fast food so they didn't have to cook. Damage to her house was minimal, though, because a row of poplars on the west side acted as a windbreak; all the wind did was strip a few branches off.
"I didn't have time for pruning, but the wind did it for me," she said.
Heidi Toth can be reached at 344-2543 or htoth@heraldextra.com.
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A1.