It wasn’t a typical Monday for the Jefferson City crews following last week’s derecho storm.

Crews got to work early in the city cemetery as Monday was their fourth day of removing tree debris. Prior to spending time cleaning up the city cemetery, Street Superintendent Dave Teeples tells Raccoon Valley Radio they have been to all of the city parks and cleaned up the majority of tree damage, then they went to St. Joseph’s Catholic Cemetery. He explains why it is taking them several days to clean up the city cemetery.

“It’s a pretty difficult job. Everything has got to be cut and hand picked out. We just can’t use equipment to move things around these headstones. So far we’ve been pretty successful at not tearing any headstones up. It’s coming along pretty good.”

Teeples estimates about 25 headstones were damaged from the storm, none of which were broken. He notes they prioritized the workload in order of safety by taking down hanging tree limbs over sidewalks and streets and handling other broken tree issues brought up by residents.

“We have been taking calls (where) people have noticed (trees) that have cracks in them or they need to come down along the city streets. We’ve stopped and taken care of those. We’ve had a couple of trees that were leaning towards people’s houses where half the tree broke in the street and the other half didn’t. So we went ahead and took these trees down to where it left the trunk standing to where it was safe, to where it wouldn’t damage any properties. We’ve just been handling them as they come in.”

In his over 25 years of living in Jefferson, Teeples says this is the worst weather-related damage he has seen. He adds, if residents still have storm brush, to place it on their easements and the private contractor, along with extra help from a company in Missouri will pass through to collect the debris.