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The brush pick-up service is activated if there is “extensive damage to trees in the community,” according to a news release.
This service has been offered by the city for the past several years depending on the severity of the storm, said Colin Stein, street superintendent with the city of Urbana. Crews spent Monday picking up items.
“Picking up the smaller items that people have from their tree, lawn and some people had some damage in their backyards,” Stein said.
The city department got a head start on Friday’s cleanup.
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“We spent much time cleaning the roads and clearing them,” he said. “We had a couple of blockages.”
The public was asked to place small or medium sized debris neatly at the curb of their home so it can be picked up by city crews.
“We will take it out to the compost facility where it is ground up into mulch and actually mixed with our leaf debris from fall leaf pickup,” Stein said.
The facility was created a few years, he said, and is used widely. It’s used by other city departments, sold to the community or to another company that might need Stein said.
One Urbana resident said the facility makes storm cleanup easy.
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“If we didn’t have a place like this, it would be awful hard to get rid of all our debris and everything,” said Keith Green, an Urbana homeowner. “Some people don’t want to pay for anything to get hauled away.”
Green is also a city employee. He and others spent Monday cleaning up city parks and cemeteries affected by the weekend storm.
One tree that had fallen and blocked Reynolds Street was full of honeybees and local beekeeper Sonny Iman had to be called in.
Urbana street crews cut the log full of honeybees and loaded it into Iman’s truck. Iman has about 100 colonies on his family’s farm in West Liberty. He estimates the log has between 40,000 and 50,000 bees inside.
“I drilled a hole here and a hole here, give them another way in and out,” Iman said.
“I’d much rather see the tree still up … and the bees in it … and doing good,” he said. “This way at least we got something out of it.”
Anyone who needs help with swarm removal shouldn’t spray it with anything, Iman said, including a garden hose. Check for a list of local beekeepers from the West Central Ohio Beekeepers Association and the SouthWestern Ohio Beekeepers Association. He will travel up to 40 miles from West Liberty for a honeybee swarm removal.
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