Strong winds split massive park oak, topple other tree limbs in Greensburg

The worst of Monday’s windstorms bypassed Westmoreland County, but strong morning gusts brought down limbs and damaged trees at several locations in Greensburg.

The winds sheared in half a massive pin oak toward the eastern end of the city’s St. Clair Park, temporarily blocking part of a paved walking path.

Crews began to cut up the fallen portion of the tree Monday, but much work remained to clear what remained strewn across the ground Monday evening.

“It’s gigantic, probably 200 years old,” said Glenn Moyer, Greensburg parks and recreation superintendent. “We spent about four hours on it today. We’ll be working on getting that cleaned up over the next couple of days.”

Moyer said, after it’s cut up, the fallen portion of the tree likely will be transformed into compost, similarly to how the city handles all its brush debris.

“I hope the other side stays alive and lives another 200 years,” he said.

Some additional storm damage occurred at the Fifth Ward playground on South Spring Avenue.

“There were branches everywhere,” Moyer said.

The city’s public works crew was busy elsewhere cleaning up after the storm.

“We had probably four or five trees that we had to get off of roads,” public works director Tom Bell said. “We had ones that got tangled up over on Fifth Ward and over on College Avenue.”

A light in the railroad underpass tunnel was knocked out of commission in the process, and West Penn Power was notified to make repairs, Bell said.

The public works crews were finished with their part of the cleanup by midday, he said.

Monday’s highest official wind speed in Westmoreland County, as of 6:15 p.m., was 25 mph, recorded in the afternoon at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Unity.

But, “There were some gusts estimated at 30 mph to 40 mph on the leading edge of the storms that came through in the morning,” said Bill Modzelewski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Pittsburgh office in Moon. That storm passed through Westmoreland between 8 a.m. and 8:45 a.m., he said.

During the afternoon, the fiercest storms passed just south of the Pennsylvania border. Modzelewski said emergency officials had yet to compile damage reports from Preston County, W.Va., where a funnel cloud was spotted at about 1:30 p.m.