Weekend storm ravages Sutton and Burke

by Richard Creaser

SUTTON — Saturday evening’s thunderstorm tore a path of destruction through Sutton and Burke.  Along the way strong winds toppled trees and peeled off the roof of Ryan Simpson’s cattle barn on Underpass Road.

“It’s the second roof we lost this year,” Mr. Simpson said on Monday afternoon from his farm on the Burke Road.  “We had a section of roof tore off, rafters and all in April.”

Though the south side of the barn roof suffered extensive damage, Mr. Simpson reported no injuries to farm hands or livestock.

“The cows are loving being out in the sunshine today,” he said.  “But they were kind of pissed when it was raining Saturday.”

Mr. Simpson doesn’t yet know how long it will take to repair the barn, or how much it will cost.  He is still awaiting a decision from his insurance adjuster.

While the barn roof was the most visible sign of the storm, Mr. Simpson also reported some crop damage from the storm’s accompanying hail.  The hail damage is largely confined to stripping leaves from the corn, he said. The high winds also tore free the plastic covering and the dozens of heavy tires used to cover his silage feed bunk at the Burke Road farm.

“It took us a while to get that back on,” Mr. Simpson said.  “That’s not easy to move.”

At the time of the storm John Mulholland was across the valley with friends on his way home from the Caledonia County Fair. From their vantage point they could clearly see the storm moving along the valley.

“It looked like a straight shot traveling west to east,” Mr. Mulholland said.

Mr. Mulholland thought he had escaped the storm unscathed.  But that impression was shattered when a friend pointed out that one of his large trees had been felled by the storm.

“My wife thought she’d heard a pop,” Mr. Mulholland said.  “Then we looked out and saw the tree had come down.”

The loss of the single tree was the only damage his property sustained, he said.  But the damage could have been worse had the tree fallen the other way or had vehicles been parked underneath it.  The shady spot is a place that they sometimes park cars, he said.

The hardest hit areas were between Sutton and East Burke, where downed trees blocked many roads leading into and out of the community, Burke Assistant Town Clerk Linda Corey said on Tuesday.  The Burke Hollow Road and Bugbee Crossing Road were particularly badly ravaged.

In the immediate aftermath of the storm Burke Hollow, Bugbee Crossing, Sugarhouse Road, and Brook Road were all littered with downed trees, Mr. Mulholland said.

“We had to take the long way around to get back home,” he said.  “I haven’t seen anything like this since that big ice storm hit Montreal about eight years back.”

The storm knocked out power to many homes in the area, Ms. Corey said.  Burke Town School had its power restored Monday evening, she said.

“I live right up the road and there wasn’t anything like what happened here,” Ms. Corey said.  “You could tell it was a bad storm, but there wasn’t much except some lightning and hail.”

The localized nature of the storm mystified those who went through it.  Mr. Simpson marveled at the fact that you could travel half a mile in either direction and see no signs of the storm that damaged his barn roof.

“It’s like a frickin’ swath cut right through here,” he said.  “We get some wind here from time to time, but this is the worst it’s been in years.”