The main topic of discussion at the Perryville Board of Aldermen meeting on March 18 was the damage caused by a powerful storm and an EF3 tornado that struck the city overnight from Friday, March 14, to early Saturday, March 15, resulting in significant destruction throughout the area.
According to the Perryville and Rural Perry County fire departments, initial estimates indicated that approximately 300 structures were damaged by storms in Perry County and the city of Perryville. The departments also reported responding to over 30 calls, which ranged from power lines to collapsed buildings, but had received no reports of injuries.
Perryville City Administrator Brent Buerck reported to the board on the damage sustained by the city.
“One of the things we’ve learned, unfortunately, where we’ve done this before in 2017, the dumpsters were critical,” Buerck said. “We had a path to get reimbursed in 2017. I don’t think that’s going to avail itself this time. We talked first thing Saturday morning, and we said we want dumpsters. So, we wound up with seven of them that day. I think we’ve added an eighth, and we’re back to seven right now. We’re hovering around seven or eight dumpsters, but we dumped them 22 times each, about two times, so you can estimate. Lessons learned, and we’ll continue to remember this. If you can be the first guy to get dumpsters in, you can do a lot in the community.”
Buerck explained that the city was using volunteer labor to help clean up the debris left by the tornado.
“We’re setting it up to power through with volunteers,” he said. “We set up AmeriCorps. They started this morning at eight o’clock. They are receiving all of our volunteers, and they’re also receiving the calls for service, and then they’re helping us [to organize them into teams]. We did this with AmeriCorps in the last tornado.
So, what we’ll do — and what [Public Works Director Jeff Layton] and I talked about is that we’re going to keep a dumpster with these volunteers. If they’re cleaning up neighborhoods, we’re going to try to keep a dumpster there, and we’re going to keep moving it for them because we want to maximize this labor while we have it.”
Buerck told the board that he had spoken with a Lutheran church in Cape Girardeau that was working on forming a crew to bring to town Thursday, and he was hoping that there would be other volunteers on the way in the coming days. He used as an example that 97 people from a Baptist church came to town and cleaned up an area within a few hours.
“It was the power of the people, and we’ve had a bunch of good ones come in,” he said. “We’ve had a bunch of good ones come in. I thought it was cool that people with Ames Construction were over at the school district. That was pretty awesome. They called that morning and said, “Hey,” we’ve got a lot of people that want to help. You guys may remember John Brown. He originally helped us organize the parental committees on the baseball fields. He’s working for Ames, and he suggested it. He said, ‘We thought the most important thing we could do would be to give that labor to the school.’ You know, we had needs, but they’re not as important as getting these kids back to school. I put Dr. Jones and Mitch together, and I think they spent the full day there with their work. So, again, people stepped up.”
Buerck also advised the board that there were municipalities who had offered the city help in cleaning up.
“Our friends and allies around the area said, ‘Hey, we can come help if you need anything.’ To this point, there’s no shame in asking for help.
We’ve got cities that’ll send us some help. So, if the board’s OK, I’m going to reach out to some of these cities, and I’m going to let them come in and help us. We’re going to try to power through. Not only do we have the retired folks coming in, but if we can get a couple of people from cities for two weeks, I think we can make a huge dent in this. We’ll have dumpsters there, and while they’re not loading limbs, they might load dumpsters, but the goal would be to keep them busy.”
