Bass Lake neighbors cleaning up after Monday night storm

 

BASS LAKE, Ind. – Bass Lake was hit hard by Monday night’s storms, as winds up to seventy miles an hour tore down trees and limbs, took down power lines and wrecked whole piers and overturned boats.

“It was pandemonium here last night,” said John Brooke, the owner of C&H Tree Service, who was caught out in the middle of the storm, while driving out to a job site. He said he had to cut through at least two trees before he could make it there.

The day after the storm, he said things have gotten busier.

“Everything started coming down, and I’d get phone call after phone call. Right around the block here, a guy had a piece javelined into the top of his roof, so it was about, that big of a hole,” Brooke said, gesturing to show how big the hole was.

“So how many calls have you had to go out to?” I asked.

“This is my fifth,” he replied.

The home I met Brooke at was lucky, he said; he cut down two trees there earlier in August that the owner feared would come down on the house during the next big storm.

A cottage up the road, near Boa Drive, was less fortunate: it’s owner, Terrence Ryan told me that his niece called him last night with the bad news.

“Luckily there’s not a whole lot of damage, but there’s enough damage that there’s a hole in the roof, there’s water in the house, and so on,” Ryan said. “We’ve got quite a bit of cleanup to do.”

Ryan added that fortunately no one was hurt, and that the damage was all repairable.

Other homes didn’t make it out so easily. On South County Road 210, parts of a cottage’s roof were blown off in the wind—along with some of its rooftop deck. Neighbors told me that its owner had just finished remodeling the property.

While Bass Lake has seen plenty of powerful storms, some feel that this may have been the worst in quite some time.

“We’ve had storms, and I normally get a call or two, but this has been one right after another, after another, and all of them have property damage, so I’d say this is much more severe than stuff I’ve seen in the past month or two,” Brooke said, and added that it may be a week or two before all the damage is cleaned up.

Brooke recommended that if homeowners have trees nearby and are worried about them coming down on the property, to call a specialist sooner than later.