NEWBERRY, S.C. — Newberry county officials are still checking for any damage in that area from the storm. Earlier today that area was under severe thunderstorms warnings and was getting heavy rain and high winds.
“we have six operations channels on our fire rescue and ems system and all six of those radio channels were tied up at one time today during the height of the storm,” Newberry County Sheriff Lee Foster said.
Newberry county was one of the many in the midlands who was hit by today’s severe weather.
Sheriff Foster says the county started working on a plan earlier this week to prepare for the storm but says severe weather isn’t something new for Newberry county.
“We’re usually right in the midst of tornadic weather and bad thunderstorms. so we pretty much do this all the time throughout the year so we usually operate under the same conditions we just are now able to hone it in to certain areas of the county that we know might get hit worse than the others, ” Foster said.
Sheriff foster says the weather in Newberry county was not as bad as they expected but many community members were still impacted by the heavy storm.
“We’ve had numerous wrecks because when it rains like its rained people hydroplane, we’ve had some power outages throughout the county mostly in the Prosperity, Little Mountain area," Foster said. "We’ve had a couple houses that have had trees fall on them, damage assessment has not been done on that and we’ve had numerous trees in the road, but at present all of that has been cleared out and people are able to get around.”
Now that the storm has passed the sheriff says they will move to a more clean up focused process and will be checking in on communities member throughout the county.
“Our emergency service is almost entirely volunteers. volunteer firefighters, volunteer rescue squad members and they live in the communities they serve, wholly. So they know everybody in the community and they know who needs help so they will go check on them as well. that’s the beautiful part of living in Newberry county,” Foster said.
