Published: August 18, 2009 09:10 am         

Winds damage buildings; water uproots utility poles, floods roads

Garfield County residents were cleaning up Monday following a slew of severe thunderstorms that rolled through the area late Sunday.

Some areas north of Enid, between Carrier and Kremlin, received around 6 inches of rainfall, according to Mike Honigsberg, Enid and Garfield County Emergency Management director. That amount of rain, along with 70 mph winds, left power lines down along northern parts of the county.

John Little, a spokesman for OG&E Electric Services, said the water table became so high in places it caused utility poles to come out of the ground. That left 1,100 county residents without power late Sunday.

That number had improved Monday; however, OG&E crews were having to reset utility poles in concrete encasements in order to ensure the same thing wouldn’t happen when the next round of storms hit. Power was restored to customers in the Kremlin area around 5:30 p.m., Little said.

About 84 customers on the west side of Enid were without power Monday night as crews worked to replace poles damaged during Sunday night’s storms, he said.

At Chisholm High School, tin roofing and tree limbs were scattered across the parking lot. A building housing the school agriculture program was heavily damaged, and a pair of portable classrooms were destroyed, said Principal Jaymie Morley. A marquee also was blown out.

Two ticket booths at the football stadium were blown away, along with a new scoreboard at the baseball stadium, which recently had been installed.

There was no apparent damage to the main school building.

In Goltry, a vacant building next to New Covenant Fellowship collapsed, with falling bricks damaging some parked vehicles.

No injuries were reported.

Sunday night’s storms also completely washed out some county roads, Honigs-berg said.

“Part of the road is gone,” he said. “People need to be very, very careful.”

Barricades, he said, had been put up around areas where county roads had been washed out by the torrential rains.

“They were pretty powerful,” Honigsberg said. “It was one of those strange evenings for thunderstorms.

“But we’re prepared and ready to go (for the next round),” he said.

More storms were forecast Monday night and today, according to National Weather Service.

Storms that developed in Grant County Monday night caused torrential rain and forced authorities to close U.S. 81 south of Medford because of high water.

According to Honigsberg and County Commissioner Mike Postier, flooding and wind seemed to cause most damage, but not all of it.

Cloud-to-ground lightning struck a few structures within the county, and there were several reports of hail. Several large cottonwood trees were blown down around the county, Postier said.

In Garfield County, one inch hail was spotted four miles north of Enid and near Carrier. Meanwhile 11⁄4 inch hail was spotted four miles west of Hillsdale.

Grant and Kay counties also reported large hail, and power lines had been blown down in Alfalfa County, according to the National Weather Service.

Andrea Balay, who lives two miles north and three-quarters of a mile west of the intersection of U.S. 412 and Oklahoma 58 in Major County, said her property had extensive damage from the storms.

Balay said the windshield on her family’s vehicle had been broken out, possibly from large hail. Winds also removed the roof from a big tin shed and littered the farm with debris.

Balay said her sister, who lives only about a mile away, had little, if any damage to her property at all.

“It almost had to be a small tornado,” she said.