(Radio Iowa) – Widespread wind damage is reported in southwest Iowa’s Montgomery County after this (Thursday) morning’s severe storms. Montgomery County Emergency Management Director Brian Hamman says the worst damage appears to be concentrated in the southeast corner of the county. “Areas around Villisca and Nodaway especially from damage that we’ve been able to see and respond to so far, but it’s still early on in the morning and we’re doing damage assessments and responding to calls as they come in,” Hamman says.
“The one thing we would ask is that people stay away from the area and don’t travel if you don’t have to, because we don’t want people hindering clean-up efforts or responders getting out to calls.” Henry Kasha of Villisca is a weather spotter, and says there’s extensive tree damage throughout Villisca after high winds pummeled the community this morning, with gusts reaching 73 miles an hour.
“It looks like it took a lot of the tops off of the trees and the roots on some of them too, I suppose it might have been due to the wet weather because some of the trees came right out of the ground,” Kasha says. “We got a lot of damage, there’s power outages, wires yanked out of the sides of houses and things like that. When the rain went through, it looked like a white wall of water that went through.” Hamman says it’s still unclear if the damage was caused by a tornado or straight-line winds, but there’s both tree and structural damage.
“We don’t have any confirmed tornadoes at this point, but we’ve got significant wind damage to trees, outbuildings, power poles, and a number of other fixtures and facilities throughout the county,”Hamman says. The National Weather Service reports damaged grain bins near the U-S Highway 34 and U-S Highway 71 interchange north of Villisca. Hamman says torrential rains also led to some flooded roadways throughout the county.
“A lot of low land flash flooding occurred early on because of the torrential rain fall,” Hamman says. “But, I think a lot of those concerns are slowly fixing themselves as we get through the morning here.” For anybody who still encounters any flooded roadways, Hamman reminds motorists to “turn around, don’t drown” and seek an alternate route.
