DES MOINES, Iowa — Monday night’s tornadoes gave people quite a scare. One of them roared right through Des Moines.
Des Moines Public Works Department tells Local 5 that there’s a tremendous amount of tree damage in the block or two radius around its path.
Local 5 stopped by one affected neighborhood around the North of Grand area, where locals spent hours in cleanup-mode on Tuesday.
“Everyone came out. They were making sure all their neighbors were okay…also pitching in, grabbing rakes, grabbing chainsaws... just making sure that everyone was doing okay," local resident Maggie Tillman said.
She was caught off guard by the ferocity of Monday night’s storm.
“They always say that it’s an ominous green when there’s something really bad happening and the sky completely turned green and it was just… your stomach does a little flip flop and you’re like ‘Oh no! What is going to happen?’” Tillman remembered.
Just two hours after the storm passed, she took a walk through town.
“It was just shocking to see. There was a tree down by the fire station and that was completely blocking the road," Tillman said.
Neighbors have since been dealing with the aftermath.
One told Local 5 that his windows broke, and his playset was knocked over. Another told Local 5 that her taillight and fender are broken, her gutters were blown off, and a stump put a hole in her roof.
In addition to debris and damage, Monday's storms knocked out power for thousands.
According to MidAmerican Energy, over 50,000 customers were impacted across the Des Moines area and the quad cities (including Iowa and Illinois) during peak outages hours. Des Moines accounted for 12,000.
On Tuesday morning, MidAmerican confirmed that they restored tens of thousands of customers' power. They expect the rest of Des Moines power to be restored by 7 p.m this Tuesday.
Cleanup is a job that takes more heads than one. Des Moines’ Public Works Department has been out assessing damage.
“Teams have been crawling through all of the affected neighborhoods, making sure that all of the branches and trees that have fallen have been pushed off to the side," Public Works Director Jonathan Gano said.
Gano tells Local 5 that getting roads back open has been their number one priority.
And more cleanup is coming, including yard debris removal.
“This is way more debris than we would expect a resident to manage through our normal yard waste program so we’ll be offering a supplementary collection," he said.
Gano says, on Friday, they’ll be making stops around town along that day’s garbage collection route. Just make sure that you put your debris against the back of the curb. Tree debris has to be under 10 feet long and less than 18 inches in diameter.
The exact area that will get free debris pickup is clarified in this map. The path of the tornado is in green and the orange represents where storm debris collection will cover.
Gano says a large chunk of damage should be taken care of this week and they expect to be taking care of the last of it in the next week or two.
Urbandale is also looking at some damage. Their public works department tells Local 5 that a lot of trees are down. And, while most of the structure damage is cosmetic, a few roofs have been partially torn off.
Urbandale City Public Works says 90% of the damage is within a two square mile radius.
You can get a look at the path of damage with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Damage Assessment Toolkit.