Cleanup begins after Wednesday night storm in Michiana

SOUTH BEND, Ind - Last night some parts of Michiana saw strong thunderstorms where some areas saw wind gusts up to almost 80-miles-per-hour. 

Today, people living in some of those hard-hit areas spent the day cleaning up tree branches and debris from the storms.

This storm left many branches and trees down and those I spoke to today told me about the close calls they had once those strong gusts rolled through.

The Wednesday night storm cutting power to thousands of people across the area.

Those winds were so strong that the South Bend International Airport reported a wind gust of close to 80-miles-per-hour.

Austin Borkowski who lives on grove street in the Ardmore neighborhood -- was nervous during the storm, especially with having a newborn in the house.

"My wife pretty much grabbed her as soon as the wind started coming in, we started seeing all the trees shifting, go over sideways, boom lights went out really quick, she went downstairs, I pretty much waited to see what was going on and was hoping there wasn’t much major damage.” said Borkowski.

Austin got lucky since his house barely had any damage, but his neighbor not as much after almost being crushed by a falling tree while sitting in his RV. 

“Maybe about two to three feet from where he was sitting, and he was on the phone, and he told me as soon as he was alright that my brother is picking me up and he pretty much left that night,” said Borkowski.

Another resident, Paul Garwood, has been out all day cleaning up the aftermath of the storm and was also left without power for seven hours.  

“Just out of nowhere, you heard a lot of noise, and it was about 3-4 minutes of complete chaos, you couldn’t even see out the window, I just heard things smashing, and we came out and it snapped off the top of a pine tree, and branches and trees everywhere, it seemed to come out of nowhere,” said Garwood.

Juan Antonio Medrano Jr who works for Veracruz tree service has been clearing trees from last night's storm all morning.

“We've been out here since 7:30 a.m., tree fell on the house, we had to go up there and clear it off, it was a pretty big tree, all the stuff is on the other side, I've been working here 10, 11, 12 years and after the storm last night, we’ve been on it”, said Medrano Jr. 

Power companies across the area have also been working hard to turn the lights back on to homes affected by the storms.

What started out as a few thousand outages is now down to a few hundred.