Employees of the Greene County Highway Department and the Greeneville Light & Power System removed fallen trees from county roads and restored electric power by midnight Friday after high winds that struck southern Greene county on Friday afternoon.

Greene County Road Superintendent David Weems said Highway Department employees had trees cleared from a dozen roads across southern Greene County by about 7 p.m. Friday.

He said that in some places so many trees were felled by high winds on some roads, such as Cedar Creek Road, that Highway Department employees had to use large, rubber-tired front-end loaders to push splintered tree trunks to the sides of the roads.

Some fallen trees, he said, were as much as five-feet in diameter and many roads had multiple trees lying across them.

"It will take us several weeks to get all that debris picked up," Weems said. "But we sure were glad to get a couple of days off on Saturday and Sunday. We had worked pretty much for two solid weeks because of all the snow and ice."

Chuck Bowlin, the GL&PS's operations manager, said the local electric utility's crews by midnight Friday had finished restoring power to the customers who had been affected by the high winds, which were estimated to have gusted at about 90-mph Friday afternoon.

The highest number of customers to lose power at any one time on Friday, Bowlin said, was about 1,200 in the Warrensburg Road area.

"We had them back in about 40 minutes," Bowlin said.

He said GL&PS crews spent the rest of Friday afternoon and evening dealing with scattered outages across southern Greene County.

"The second largest group of customers who lost power totaled about 500," Bowlin said.

GL&PS lost 11 power poles to the high winds, including several that had electrical transformers mounted on them.

Bill Brown, director of the Greeneville-Greene County Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, said he received only two reports of serious damage to structures across southern Greene County from Friday afternoon's high winds.

In one instance, he said, a barn was destroyed along Camp Creek Road. In another case, Brown noted, the roof was blown from a mobile home along Pilot Knob Road.

Lt. Wesley Holt, of the Greene County Sheriff's Department, said a number of homes in the St. James community lost shingles to the high winds.

A National Weather Service spokesman on Friday evening said a weather-monitoring station at Camp Creek Elementary School had detected wind gusts of "nearly 90-mph" on Friday afternoon.

Lt. Holt said he believed wind gusts might have exceeded 90-mph because of the extent of damage to trees and utility poles that he saw in the Cedar Creek and St. James communities.

Holt said the wind damage extended from the area of the old stores in Cedar Creek westward to (and across) the Cocke County line.