City Receiving Debris Complaints

Tree limbs from the wind storm 10 days ago are piling up in Tulsa. In a few cases, they've landed on top of limbs from the ice storm and that's making plenty of work for city inspectors.

The News On 6's Emory Bryan reports the city gets lots of complaints about high grass this time of year, but some people have neighbors who still haven't cleaned up their tree limbs.

Laura Showalter's problem is right over her back fence. Her neighbor's yard is piled with limbs. She's reported the high grass to the City of Tulsa, where grass over a foot tall is a code violation.

"Now then it's about three feet tall and I told her it ought to be tall enough now," said the 77-year-old Showalter.

The city estimates there are 2,000 homes in Tulsa with limbs from the ice storm left in the yard.  It will take at least until the fall to handle all of the complaints.

There are plenty of more extreme examples. Limbs from the ice storm still litter some front yards and the grass hasn't been cut. Dangling limbs are over the sidewalks and the neighbors haven't seen anyone at the house for years.

Some homes are top priority because they're a danger to the neighbors.

It's normal this time of year for the city to have lots of high grass complaints, but the storm debris has added to the workload.

"High weeds, that's not an expensive problem to fix, but the tree limbs in this situation have to be removed by hand, by people, so it's time consuming," said Tim Cartner of the City of Tulsa.

In one case, the city determined the owner lives in Florida. He'll get a bill for $1,500 after the city pays to clean it up. The home was already been boarded up by the city and could one day be sold because the owner isn't responding.

It is cases like that that push less extreme problems further down the priority list, where Mrs. Showalter's continues to wait.

Tulsa has seven inspectors to handle all those cases and they're mainly working reports of high grass and stacks of limbs. The number to call is 596-2100.