SPARTANBURG, S.C. (WSPA) – Severe thunderstorms kept first responders all over the Upstate busy Monday night.
“The National Weather Service did a great job, they gave us a heads up they said it was going to be a little but stronger than our other severe weather systems that might come in,” Robbie Swofford, Spartanburg County emergency management coordinator, said.
That strong storm system took down trees, shut off traffic lights, and even sparked fires across the Upstate.
“We were here monitoring the storm and most of the storm damage that we received was primarily lines down and a few trees down as well,” Swofford said. “We did have one tree down on a house, we might have had more- but I only recollect one tree being down on a house and there was one tree that actually fell on a vehicle.”
Despite only a few major incidents in Spartanburg County, the night still kept first responders in Roebuck busy.
“Not long after five o’clock we ended up with seven calls at one time. We handled those. It was mainly power lines down, trees. We mitigated all those issues,” District Chief for South Spartanburg Fire, Rusty Smith said. “We were on a total of 23 calls from five o’clock yesterday afternoon till seven o’clock this morning.”
Some of those calls were lengthy Smith added.
“One of our trucks sat on one call for about three hours waiting to get assistance to get the roadway cleared and power lines out of the trees.”
North of Roebuck, Spartanburg City Fire Department was called to put out a fire at Big Lots, leaving residents nearby grateful.
“My husband and I were eating Subway at seven o’clock, three fireman walked in and were about to give their order for supper and they got a call and turned on the lights and sirens and we found out they went to Big Lots because they had an electrical fire.” Angela McWhite said. “They came in to eat supper and had to stop taking care of their super need to go reason to respond to something bad that had happened.”
Next month Spartanburg Emergency Management will provide a free training on disaster preparedness that’s open to the public.
