UNION CITY, Mich. \u2014 Fallen trees are still keeping people out of their homes and off their property more than a week after the deadly tornado cut through Union City.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of volunteers loaded up and headed out to clear the debris Saturday free of charge, using their own tools on their own time.<\/p>\n
The Union City Tornado Response Team recruited dozens of groups through a single Facebook post asking for help.<\/p>\n
They set out with chainsaws and tractors, their work ranging from raking twigs into a pile, to cutting down dangerously perched tree trunks.<\/p>\n
Daniel Farnham is used to responding to disasters as a maintenance worker, but never expected to need help himself after his trees snapped.<\/p>\n
“You don’t realize the impact it is on the actual homeowner itself when you’re not on that side of it,” he said.<\/p>\n
Crews met up for a morning briefing and split up. One to remove bigger trees — and another to pick up smaller bits of wood scattered across yards.<\/p>\n
Off of Division Street, workers ran tractors and excavators offered by businesses.<\/p>\n
“It’s like, ‘Hey, what can you, if anything, offer? This is what we’re doing,'” volunteer Dave Ferris said. “And they’re like, ‘No problem. Tell us what you need.'”<\/p>\n
Volunteers cleared twisted branches from this entire valley next to a nursing home.<\/p>\n
Most of the crew had never met before, but they worked together on a plan to remove trees suspended 30 feet in the air.<\/p>\n
“You’ve got to start somewhere,” Ferris said. “We’ve got the time. We’ve got the equipment, the availability to help and stuff.”<\/p>\n
Tree grapples will handle the rest of the work once these crews finish, with much of the debris headed to a county burn pile.<\/p>\n
The Response Team says it isn\u2019t ready to quit until everyone has every need met.<\/p>\n
“We’re not going to solve this problem in a week,” Tornado Response Team Leader Judi Henckel said. “We’re not going to solve it in a month. We’re going to do our darndest to get it solved as fast as we can.”<\/p>\n
“Today we have 20 people get back a little piece of their life,” she added.<\/p>\n
The Response Team also has a critical need of plastic totes for homeowners to pack up their belongings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UNION CITY, Mich. \u2014 Fallen trees are still keeping people out of their homes and off their property…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":657376,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[746,159,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-657375","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-environment","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116233202827629888","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/657376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}