Cleanup begins

By Steven Jones
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
The Selma Times-Journal
Brett Howard has a simple explanation for why Hurricane Dennis wasn't as bad as forecasters expected it to be: God.
“He didn't want me to go through that again,” the director for the Dallas County Emergency Management Agency said, jokingly referring to Hurricane Ivan's impact.
Divine intervention aside, while Dennis wasn't as devastating on the area as Ivan was, it still took its toll.
As of 3 p.m. Monday, 11 buildings in Dallas County reported damage to the EMA. Three homes were totally destroyed.
Howard said the Black Belt Red Cross would be working with the residents to provide food and shelter where needed.
“What type of response we give is going to depend on each individual family's needs,” ARC director Jeanette Crusoe said.
Crusoe said the ARC is currently sending out people to do damage assessments as the calls for assistance come in.
“We're just beginning to get calls in,” she said.
In addition to the structural damage caused by Dennis, thousands of area residents were without power as of Monday afternoon.
Jan Ellis, spokesperson for Alabama Power said that about 6,400 AP customers were in the dark Monday afternoon in the Selma area.
Pioneer Electric reported about 7,000 households hit by Dennis.
Terry Wilhite, of Pioneer, said while the number of outages was high the system was relatively intact.
“It's extremely good news,” Wilhite said. “We have attacked the damage. By dark today (Monday) we hope to have electricity restored.”
While damage was extensive, this time around, the federal, state and local officials should be able to save taxpayer money.
After Ivan, due to power outages, the EMA brought in truckloads of ice and MREs, to make up for groceries lost during power outages that lasted more than a week in some cases.
The county also had to contract outside help for debris cleanup.
This year is different.
“The grocery stores are open,” Howard said, reasoning that residents could get ice if they needed it.
“We're not bringing in any MREs or ice,” he said. “We're going to clean up our own debris.”
The city was in a similar situation as well.
“It's pretty much standard operating procedure,” Mayor James Perkins Jr. said. “We didn't sustain the level of damage we did with Ivan.”
Perkins said the city will be cleaning up debris in the coming days, but he's hoping to avoid overtime among city employees in the process.
Even so, Perkins said if city employees do get overtime it will be kept at a minimum.
Reports from Orrville indicated that Dennis wasn't much of a problem there either.
Gene McHugh, Orrville's mayor, said that the city didn't take on much property damage.
“We were real fortunate that we survived with minor damage,” he said. “We survived pretty well.”
McHugh said the city's power was restored after utility workers removed a tree from a line.
While most of the residents in the area escaped unharmed, there's still a lot of work that needs doing.
Howard said the Black Belt as a region has more outages than any other area in the state with over 90,000 people without power.
Alabama Power is bringing in about 250 workers in the next few days, according to Ellis.
With all the hotels full, Howard said he was working with the Alabama National Guard to allow them to use the Dallas County Armory to house at least 100 workers.
“They're staging all the Black Belt operations here,” Howard said.
All of the work will take some time.
Howard said it would be at least a month before the county completed debris cleanup.
All the area electricity providers said they would be working around the clock to get everyone back on, but it would probably take some time before service would be completely restored.
Ellis said power restoration would take some time because of the nature of the repairs.
“They're so scattered,” she said. “It's a line down here and a line down there.”