Monett officials, neighbors helping week after severe storm

MONETT, Mo. — "When the chips are down, the citizens of Monett and surrounding areas can come together to face whatever we need to get the city back up on its feet," Mayor Randy Burke says while surrounded by fallen trees in Monett's South Park.

Monett and the Lawrence and Barry county areas are still picking up the pieces from severe weather on Tuesday, April 29.

The National Weather Service confirmed three tornados from that storm were in Lawrence County.

"I got a pretty good idea of the scope. You know, stoplights are out. Power's out for at least until tomorrow morning. At least that was the assessment [then]," Burke recounts from last week. "I was concerned about public safety and between police, fire and the rest of the city,"

Burke says the city has not only expanded its brush site for people to take debris, but also later in May, city workers will pick up debris from people's homes.

"Right now, seven days a week, you can bring your brush," Burke said. "May 19th, the city is going to come by and pick up all your brush. We don't know how much people have already brought us brush, and I don't know how much it is, but I know we need more bulldozers out there to move it around."

Burke says that pick up will last two weeks from the 19th.

Ozarks First went to the Monett brush pile, where we were met by Kirk Verhoff.

Verhoff, who says he doesn't live inside city limits, owns a business that is — and was — impacted by the storm.

"We had we had one limb go down, but just a bunch of debris out of the limbs. We were out of power for three days, but we had a generator, so we were very fortunate," Verhoff said. "I work a production facility here in town and we lost power too. It was down for over nine hours. It's a food facility, so that was quite the challenge for us to maintain our food that we had and raw materials and we had to condemn quite a bit just because of the loss of the power and the steam and electricity. At the house we had to quickly get a generator up and going get fuel for me.

Without outages across the county, Verhoff says he drove around an hour for gas just to power the generator.

"We had to drive to Springfield to get fuel for the day just for the generator. For two and a half days we just maintained the generator and the city and Liberty Utilities did a great job of getting our production facility back up within that nine hour time frame. We were expecting a full 24 hours down and they got us back up by 7-7:30 p.m. that night."

Verhoff applauds city leaders for the pickup later this month.

"I've got one associate who lost seven oak trees all around her house. She has no idea how she's going to be able to cut them up, but this is an opportunity for them to [help people] clean up their yards," Verhoff said.

Just outside city limits, David Rosebrough is using equipment to move debris, not from his house, but his neighbors.

"The Monett Road District has been out here picking up debris, if we can get it to the road and they got out here pretty quick," Rosebrough said. "They've done a really good job."

Rosenbrough says they've had support from all over the county.

"It's just a lot of work. We had people coming from all over showing up just a few hours after the storm with chainsaws and tractors, and it was a lot of help, a lot of especially the younger people that showed up. It was really good," Rosebrough said.

Burke says he's thankful for the everyone who has helped.

"I want to thank several different fire departments, Cassville, as far as Shell Knob, Carthage. They get an honorable mention because they helped us and sent a seven man team this time, and the city staff as well," Burke said.

A Facebook post from the City of Monett says they will announce when the Monett brush pile will go back to normal hours.