Just a little more than a week after a tornado ripped through Niles, high winds were back in the area causing damage.
The National Weather Service issued a high wind watch for Berrien and Cass County areas through 6 p.m. Wednesday.
Wind gusts were estimated to reach between 30 to 40 mph, with the possibility of winds reaching up to 60 mph.
The wind toppled two trees onto the swingset behind Wonderland Cinema in Riverfront Park around 11 a.m. Wednesday.
A large tree near the sidewalk by the playground was first to fall and crashed into another smaller tree a few feet to the east.
There was no one on the swing set at the time and therefore no one was injured.
At the park on Wednesday, Ray Scott, the working supervisor for the Niles City Street Department, was the first to respond. He said it did not appear initially that the swing set was damaged.
Scott said that high winds in combination with the wet soil and the larger tree’s shallow root system contributed to the collapse.
Scott cautioned residents to be aware if they were walking under large trees of branches that might fall.
“They should always be careful and always be looking up,” Scott said. “ Broken branches could always fall.”
As a precaution, he asked the five-person crew assigned to the tree clean up to wear hard hats.
He estimated it would take the crew about an hour to clean up the tree.
Less than an hour later, around noon, fire authorities from Niles responded to a house at the 500 block of Union Street, where a pine tree near a back alley had fallen on top of power lines, causing four houses on the block to lose power.
Resident Tonia Hoy was in the dining room at her house on Union Street, when she and her son, Brock Johnson, 14, said they heard a crash. Hoy said she smelled burning wires and saw a spark when she looked out the window onto the garage area behind the house.
Hoy said she contacted the city and then called 911. She was home Wednesday because it was her day off, she said.
Larry Lamb, the Niles Fire Chief, said the entrance service cable — the line where power enters the house had been torn away.
Niles Fire Captain Don Wise said the cable was partially burned up in the pole where it connected to the east side of the house. The entrance cable line, which is attached to utility poles in the back alley, was was ripped away when the tree fell. A couple of other cables were bent, authorities said.
City utilities were also on the scene working to remove the tree and repair the lines, which Wise said could be fixed that day. Two of the four houses had damage that would require an electrician to fix before their power could be restored.
Wise said authorities were getting many calls Wednesday related to high wind damage.
“If you listen to the scanner it is happening all over Berrien County,” he said. “They are still getting trees down because we have had so much rain. The ground is saturated and it just up roots these trees.”
Wise said he did not have a cost estimate for damage at that time.