Crime & Safety

No Serious Injuries Reported From Tropical Storm

Public safety officials say weekend was relatively quite.

College Park fared better than what was expected from the tropical storm passing through the area over the weekend, and there were no serious injuries reported, according to public safety officials.

“Last night was nice and quiet,” Lieutenant Robert Mueck of the University of Maryland Department of Public Safety said on Sunday morning after the storm.

He said most people seemed to stay in late Saturday night, as the outskirt of Hurricane Irene went through College Park.

Find out what's happening in College Parkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

“It was almost like a ghost town,” he said.

In addition to few people being on the streets, the hurricane was downgraded from a Category 3 storm on Thursday to Category 1 by the time it went over the east coast of Maryland, with less intense wind speeds.

Find out what's happening in College Parkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

“We certainly fared better than early predictions,” said the city’s chair of the Citizen Corp Council, Dave Milligan. “All in all we did pretty good and I'll take preparations that are not needed over the reverse any day.”

Corrigan said the fire department averaged 24 people working from Friday night until Sunday. He said there were times through the night that there weren’t enough places to put the officers.

“It ended up being probably better than what I was originally planning for,” Corrigan said. “I started planning early when it was a stronger storm.”

Even so, Corrigan said the call volume was four times higher than a normal weekend, pushing 55 to 60 calls, most of them being for trees on houses and downed power lines.

And they weren’t small limbs that were falling either.

“We weren’t really getting tree branches we were getting whole trees down,” Corrigan said.


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

To request removal of your name from an arrest report, submit these required items to arrestreports@patch.com.