This news story appeared a few days after a huge storm swept through our region.  Some areas were hit with heavy snow, some with high winds... everyone got way too much rain!  I thought it was an interesting story... so here it is! 

Three chainsaws and teamwork cut a way home

By Callie White - Daily World Writer

Saturday, December 8, 2007

Trees down in the roadway? Why wait for the PUD and the Department of Transportation to clean it up when the Twin Harbors are chockablock with loggers packing chainsaws in their trucks?

Indeed, even before the trees finished dropping late Monday, residents were out in force on the roads with their chainsaws bucking trees, especially on the side roads where clearing trees was a lower priority.

But private citizens got to work on a bigger road Monday night — Highway 101.

 

They were a caravan of about 40 cars and trucks and somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 people, said Rob Lunsford of South Bend, and all they wanted to do was go home to Pacific County. But they were waylayed in Artic with downed trees blocking the road to the south.

Lunsford said he had been in the Artic Tavern cooling his heels (literally, Artic had no power) when the word came down — “There was a tree that was about 48 inches around. The PUD gave up.”

Lunsford then turned to his fellow strandees. Some were from as far away as Canada, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Others were trying to get home from working in Aberdeen.

“I said, ‘Anyone going to Raymond? You better get out here and get working if you want to go home,’ ” Lunsford said.

Astonishingly, that’s exactly what happened. The tree that withstood a clearing crew saw fell to the three chainsaws the travelers had. As they moved down the road, the hardier motorists took turns bucking trees off the road. They would continue doing this for six miles, Lunsford said.

And there were many, many trees to cut. Highway 101 got blasted hard by the windstorm that started Sunday night and continued into Monday afternoon. Whole stands of aspen along the way have been reduced to matchsticks, and evergreen trees were uprooted and strewn across the roadway.

“We’d move up, cut, move up and cut again,” Lunsford said. “It was like cutting a road, but sideways.”

They went through the blocked road bit by bit, Lunsford said, and they kept the chainsaws going by siphoning gas from each others’ cars. One man, John Blake of Aberdeen, took a lead role in the effort to clear the road, Lunsford said, and the rest of the stranded motorists figured out how to work well together.

“It was like a well-oiled machine,” Lunsford said. “Nobody needed to say a thing, we all just knew what to do.”

It was the last tree that nearly shut down the operation. It was enormous, and it rested five feet above the roadway, Lunsford said, making it passable by the smaller cars. A guy in a small pickup left for home and came back with a bigger chainsaw.

“We had to pull together if we wanted to get home,” Lunsford said.

Liz Anderson, spokeswoman for the Grays Harbor PUD, said the utility doesn’t have a problem with people taking matters — or chainsaws — into their own hands. However, she said, the PUD would be concerned if some of those trees were touching wires.

“Treat every wire as live wire,” Anderson cautioned.

Added in 2007

< Back to Interesting Stuff