WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — From Skycam 16, you can see construction crews working to cover-up the top of the roof of Wilkes-Barre's city hall that was ripped from the building during Monday's strong winds.
"You could actually look through and see daylight. I mean, the roof was gone," explained Mayor George Brown. "My office is right below where that blew off as is the city administrator's and our staff. So we want to make sure we protect our office and the other offices. So what we're doing right now first step is to apply sheeting that we can protect it from the weather."
The view from the sky Monday showed how you could see directly into the attic of City Hall, but the mayor says the information stored there is backed-up digitally.
"Things that were put up there just for storage, but nothing really of value. Nothing that we had to be concerned about," said Brown.
City Hall isn't the only one cleaning up today. Mayor Brown says the strong winds were felt all over the city.
"Went through all sections of Wilkes-Barre, it was devastating. A lot of trees were uprooted a lot of down power lines. We had over 800 people at one time that were out of power," added Brown.
Brown says with help from the county, enough resources were available to restore power quickly and get everyone back to normal. Well, at least the new normal with restrictions put in place by the coronavirus.
"It's been a one, two, three punch the first three months, but we're up for this. I have a great staff, great police department, wonderful fire department, hard-working DPW department, and a great staff at City Hall. We're geared to address this, and we're going to do that. We're going to come back even stronger," said Brown.
Brown says he hopes the roof to city hall can be repaired in about two weeks.