Miles City elementary school playground damaged during storm

Miles City residents were busy picking up tree branches and assessing the damage after a storm hit town Saturday evening.

“(The wind) was actually throwing me around on my balcony,” said resident Jake Murnion.

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The wind reached up to 72 miles per hour, taking down trees as it ripped through town.

One large tree fell onto the swing set on the playground at Garfield Elementary School.

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“I went to elementary here at Garfield actually," Murnion said. "To see this tree go down is heartbreaking.”

Sheila Christopherson is a teacher at the elementary school and spent her Monday morning cleaning up branches on the school's property.

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“A lot of cleanup to be done and a lot of work to repair,” she said. “It feels awful that this has happened, and very devastating and really just hurts the heart.”

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Christopherson said the tree that fell was the only "shade tree" on the playground. Three days before the storm hit, the asphalt surrounding the playground was repaved. The uprooted tree not only left the swing set destroyed but also damaged a section of the newly finished asphalt.

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Christopherson hopes they are able to get the mess cleaned up before school starts in just over a month.

“We've got bigger trees, smaller trees, but I mean there's been trees that have been just completely uprooted it in Miles City,” Rashell Scheelar, the scale house manager at the landfill, said. “It’s just been trees nonstop it feels like.”

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Scheelar has worked at the landfill for over a decade but said she has never experienced a day such as Monday.

“I've never seen it like this before. I mean we've had a lot of trees come in and everything, but this has just been nonstop,” she said. “We’ve brought in almost 32,000 tons.”