Clean up continues in Town of Turin following EF3 tornado

TOWN OF TURIN, New York (WWNY) - Clean up efforts continued Saturday morning on the West Wind Motel’s grounds after an EF3 tornado touched down Monday.

Each person was there with a task to do, all while making sure they are doing it in the safest way possible.

“I’m trying to clean this mess up,” said Bernie Ward.

Ward helped to gather volunteers from the Turin Ridge Riders, the local snowmobile club, and 5 businesses from the area. Ward says the owner of the motel, Tim Sadowski, deserves all of the help he can get.

“It’s a bad situation for him, so that’s what we are doing, we’re here to help out,” said Ward of BM Ward Builders.

Sadowski says he appreciates the community’s support.

“I mean, the amount of people that have shown up, just unannounced. ‘How can we help?’ It’s been tremendous, without them I don’t know where we will be at,” said Sadowski.

He says it’s been a long week since the tornado, but that all that matters is that the four people that were staying in his townhomes are okay.

“From what we understand, the town house actually lifted off the foundation, and they were inside when this happened, and the roof detached, and then the town house slammed back down. I can’t imagine what they went through,” said Sadowski.

Robert Binder has been here helping to clean up debris all week. He says it’s nice to have some more boots on the ground.

“Me and a couple of guys that were here all week, it just looked like a loosing battle, now with everyone here working, it’s getting done, so I’m very happy about that,” said Binder.

Those cleaning up some of the debris like this, logs, limbs and branches, say it needs to be carefully moved from here to the dump trucks. A branch or a limb could snap at any moment given that there is still energy and pressure from the tornado in all of this.

“When a twister like this goes through, it twists a lot of this stuff up, so it got a lot of energy stored up in here, so I didn’t want the guys to come in here with chainsaws, because somebody can get hurt. So what I’m doing with the track hoe is trying to break some of that energy down,” said Ward.

Village of Turin Mayor Josh Leviker says the U.S Department of Agriculture came by to inspect some of the most impacted places by the tornado. Leviker says there is a possibility for federal or state funding.

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