TEMPLE, TX — Driving on residential streets in Temple on Friday, you’ll see plenty of piles of sticks, branches and broken limbs.
It’s all leftover from the winter storm just the day before.
One of those piles belongs to the Simons, a Temple family who heard something fall off of their roof Thursday evening.
At first, they thought it was snow or ice. Come to find out, they were wrong.
“I see this big tree laying over our porch and on the sidewalk,” Cody Simons, the homeowner explained. “With all the weight of the tree limbs; that's pretty much what happens this time of year.”
That family is among many who are dealing with cleaning up broken tree branches and limbs, but it’s the city that’s dealing with a bit of a different problem: clearing roadways from fallen trees.
”They're breaking up the debris and pushing it off of the roadway, just to get it out of the way,” Cody Weems with the City of Temple said. “Then solid waste trucks will come by and actually pick it up and remove it hopefully sometime next week.”
Weems said the street department has been hard at work over the past 24 hours.
“The street department had cleared around 30 trees and limbs from roadways, they are experiencing a high volume of calls,” he explained.
However, the harsh weather is far from over.
With a weekend of possibly historic lows on the way, officials are preparing for what’s to come.
“We did a lot of preparations over the past couple days,” Jeff Achee, the director of the Harker Heights Park and Recreational Management said. “Now it's just waiting for when we need to be called to action.”
Even with the extreme low temperatures, the Simons said they’re taking it one winter storm at a time.
“Right now, I'm just trying to take care of this,” Simon said. “We're about the other one it gets here.”
If you do come across a limb or fallen tree blocking a roadway, officials advise you to call your local police department’s non-emergency number to report the location of it.
