Nothing may ever top the Derecho storm two years ago in the Elcho Area for Ted Foley, but last week’s storms are definitely at the top of his list.
“Wednesday night’s [storm] was major. It was a smaller area. It was narrower, but it was major destruction where it hit. That would be, that storm would probably be a number two in my career. Somewhere in that area,” said Foley.
Foley is the owner and operator of Foley’s Tree Service and covers most of North Central Wisconsin and into the U.P.
Between the storms on Wednesday and Monday last week, the phones at his business have been ringing nearly non-stop.
“Between the office staff fielding literally 100s of calls a day to our crews getting routed all over the place to try to figure out what the severity level is, what is most important, and what we need to respond to first. It’s just been a very busy, go, go, go atmosphere right now for us,” said Foley.
Foley’s prioritizes responses. People with trees on houses or about to fall down on a house or other critical structures will get responses sooner.
With so much damage, Foley has been using contract crews out of Florida that called offered their services.
“With this type of storm and the type of damage that occurred, we were not able to respond everything quick enough,” he said. “It was helpful getting them here, putting them on certain projects where they could relieve some trees from houses.”
Even with the extra crews, cleanup is going to take a while. Foley estimates it will take a month or so to work their way down the list.
“We’re still cleaning up from some storms that happened back in June. We do need to get back to some of our regular-scheduled work that’s not storm damage,” said Foley. “Some people can’t wait for their projects to get done. So we’re going to be bouncing crews around a little bit from regular sold work that people trees down for whatever reason to the storm damage. But it will be ongoing for a couple months.”
He encourages anyone that has storm damage they’re nervous about to call and get a quote.
“More than anything be careful. Storm damage is very dangerous. Something that everybody needs to know is there are certain tension points on trees, and you just never know what things are going to do. Be careful. If you’re uncomfortable with something, give us a call, have us look at it. We provide an estimate to you and from there we can point you in the right direction,” said Foley.
