BLOOMINGTON – While many in Magoffin County and across the region have waited months for crews to show up to clean up and remove debris from the ice storm, the crew made an unwelcomed stop at one location on North River Road, with a local family and county officials still trying to evaluate the sheer magnitude of the damages incurred when crews cut a number of trees on private property and not included in the FEMA project.
Per the state contract for the FEMA project, crews are to remove debris left by county or state road workers, all concerning only trees and debris from the ice storm.
However, a Magoffin County couple told Mortimer Media Group that is not what happened on their North River Road farm last week.
Magoffin County Judge/Executive Matt Wireman told Mortimer Media Group, “As I understand the bidding in the contract, they go bid this out, and it’s bid out to remove those imminent dangers that happen as a result of the ice storm. We could have bid that out individually as a county, but knowing there’s power in numbers and volumes, when I talked to the regional engineers, we agreed that we would put our debris estimates in with their estimates so that there would be a larger amount hopefully at a better price. Ultimately, Magoffin County is going to pay 13% of the cost of this debris cleanup out of our budget and the lesser amount we can get that for the better.”
Wireman further explained that the state bid out the project and the company that was awarded the contract is a national company that does similar projects all the time. He said local vendors could have had the opportunity to bid on it, but he didn’t know if any did.
The contract covered any stumps or treetops that had fell into the road, as well as any trees that were leaning toward the road as a result of the ice storm and only on county right of way. In general, county right of way is essentially a total of 30 feet, 15 feet from the middle of the roadway.
“It’s generally a 30-foot right of way and they’re not supposed to go outside of that, as I understand it,” Wireman said. “Even roadwork that we do, we get an easement if we need to pull dirt off of somebody’s property to help fix our road or if we need to move the road a little because of flood damage or whatever. We get easements. We just don’t go in and start taking people’s property or tearing their trees down. It’s just not right. The tree cutting company is saying the monitoring service told them to cut them. Monitoring service is telling me they’re going to send me the billable items from FEMA for that section that we should pay through the FEMA process and they’re going to send me the ones that they’re going to make them haul out of there that’s not so we can see what the difference is.”
Wireman acknowledged that there weren’t many trees in that area that should have been cut according to the contract and the right of way.
“It’s just a bad time down there,” Wireman said. “I understand the property owners are upset and I agree with them. I would be, too.”
In total, only two trees were designated for removal on that stretch of North River Road. One company comes through and identifies the trees that are eligible and need to be removed, marking each one. Another company or companies will be responsible for cutting them and removing the trees and they are to be hauled off to the industrial park, and the pieces are chipped up and haul off.
However, while out surveying the damages, neither the landowners nor Ritt Mortimer with Mortimer Media Group could find any markings on the many trees downed on the property, many of which were well over 100 years old and definitely more than 15 feet from the center of the road.
“It baffles me,” Wireman said. “If you go up the road where they’ve been doing this, even in some of the remote areas like Burton Fork and Painters Lick, I’ve driven through and seen what they’ve done in that area. They’d clean up the debris here, and then on down they’d clean up the debris here, and it was what I expected and what I had heard they had done in other counties. It looked like good work. This here, it’s a clear cut. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The homeowners, Patrick and Traci Prater, came to find out about it when they started hearing chainsaws and trees being cut last week. After a day or two of assuming the county was fixing a slip or regular road maintenance that happens from time to time, they noticed that it was something else entirely when they started surveying their property.
“I got out of the side-by-side and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, Patrick, this is bad,’” Traci Prater told Mortimer Media Group. “I told them – and there were some choice words – but I told them to get off North River Road and that’s when I told them, ‘You can go that way off North River Road or you can come back this way {motioning in the directions}, but if you’re going to come this way, you’re going to run over me because I’m going to be laying in the road.’ And that’s when I laid down in front of the excavator and I called everybody under the sun.”
After being told to leave her property, Prater said the crews refused to leave, “Because they informed Patrick that they were not leaving until they came back up here and got their lumber, because it was theirs. Because they had legal right to it from a state contract.”
Aside from the monetary value, the Praters told Mortimer Media Group logging the land has never been an option for them.
“It’s going to cause significant amount of erosion and cause more slips and more problems for our county,” Prater said. “So, we called in a professional logger, had him come down, and he started, and the further he would get into it, he’d marked a few trees and measured, and he finally looked at Patrick and he said, ‘Patrick, I don’t know. It’s beyond the scope of just a logger. You’re going to have to get a forestry consultant in here because nobody would understand the significance of the damage.’ I have yet to see one of these trees that was taken down that was marked by this monitoring company, and I don’t know, it’s just so bad.”
The owners of the company and state transportation were on a 10-minute Zoom call with Judge Wireman on Monday, with Wireman reporting that they are now looking for local vendors.
He said it is his understanding that a local contractor will be finishing the work.
“The guys that were here, they’re gone,” Wireman said. “They’ve loaded up and they’ve left, so anybody out there cutting it are new, hopefully, all local people, and we need to allow them to do what they need to do, but it will either monitored by my road department or I’m going to have to have someone going out, which is not part of the process, but we’re going to do that just to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen, again.”
