Oregon Public Broadcasting

Oregon Department of Transportation workers spent Wednesday morning clearing fallen trees from a section of Highway 26 east of Mt. Hood.

As Pete Springer reports, the trees caused extensive damage and required dozens of drivers to abandon their vehicles on the highway.

The trees started blowing down shortly after 1a.m. just east of Frog Lake on Highway 26.

Peter Murphy is a spokesman for ODOT.

He says about thirty trees fell on a twenty mile section of the highway.

Peter Murphy “Some of which had fallen onto semis and hurt ‘em, ruined ‘em.  One semi drove over a tree that was down and it took out his undercarriage.  And then we simply had trapped vehicles—we had cars, trucks, vans sports utility vehicles.  I mean you name it, we had it up there that were trapped by the trees that were down.”

ODOT had to evacuate about two dozen drivers to a nearby location while crews worked to clear the trees from the highway.

No injuries were reported.