HARWICH, Mass. — A hot, sunny day on the cape meant perfect weather for chain saws. Last Tuesday's tornado left homeowners with a massive clean-up job and they were hard at work on Sunday.
A temporary mound of topography at the Harwich town dump grows more massive by the hour. All day residents and hired guns hauled tornado debris into the dump, encouraged to get the clean-up done by a 'free dumping' policy that expires next week.
"I've been here for around nine years and I haven't seen anything like it," said Cody Grosse of Harwich.
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Darren Seaton came up from Baltimore to help a friend clear trees from his cape vacation property.
"[I] drove nine hours to get up here Saturday morning," he said. "Like eight trees fell down, so we chop them up and dispose [of] everything for him."
Nobody was killed in last week's tornado, but death surely fell upon the forests. Maples, oaks, conifers and one homeowner's apple tree snapped, uprooted and savaged by the storm. The storm caused a bounty for landscapers who could keep their eyes open.
"I have been working like 12, 13 hours a day since the tornado passed by," said Alex Silva, a landscaper.
The mountain of debris will be turned into wood chips, which will be given away for free. However, the town already has a giant pile of wood chips elsewhere on the property. So this new pile of wood chips is likely going to be tough to get rid of.
PREVIOUS: Thousands without power after tornado hits Cape Cod
And the clean-up is far from done.
"It's basically a nightmare," Grosse said. "You see what we have here and drive around town and there's still trees everywhere."
All this from a tornado rated an EF1.
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