OMAHA, Neb. (KMTV) — Friday night’s storm is still making its presence felt more than three days later.
“Something that happens like this with nature, we sure couldn’t plan for it,” Omaha Mayor Jean Stothert said. “So, we have to be flexible and adjust.”
The city is making those adjustments, as they are continuing to bring power back in areas that have lost it and focus on assisting homeowners with debris removal.
The parks on the other hand may look the way they currently do for quite some time.
“We’re still reassessing what’s in our parks. We have really worked a lot on our golf courses, but the parks are still an area that we may not get to all of our 260 plus parks for a couple weeks to make sure that we assess all the damage there,” Stothert said.
Elmwood Park is one of the more than 260 parks that is covered with debris and fallen trees.
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“Elmwood got hit really hard. A lot of old trees,” Stothert said. “They had to close the road (to the park). It got a big hit to it.”
While work has been done to clean up parts of the park already, so that it can become open to the public again, most of the parks will have to continue to wait.
The city announced today that some of the Omaha Parks’ employees have been placed on curbside pickup duty.
They also don’t have access to the city’s mulchers for the debris because the mulchers are first being used for the fallen trees in streets and neighborhoods.
“We’re using that for basically the right of way now, and the golf courses, but we really haven’t even gotten into the debris that we have to clean up at all our parks,” Stothert said.
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