Powerful winds blow new life into Prunedale’s community spirit.

Travel up the narrow canyons surrounding Prunedale these days and the thick smell of eucalyptus, accompanied by the sound of whirring chainsaws echoing off the hillsides, is hard to miss.

It’s evidence of the cleanup of hundreds, if not thousands, of the non-native trees that came crashing down around North County during the storm that slammed into the region over President’s Day weekend.

Prunedale was hit with “Category 1 hurricane-strength winds” early Feb. 17, according to PG&E meteorologists, knocking out power to 9,000 residents for up to six days and temporarily blocking nearly every major road. At least 400 residents were without potable water for days, in addition to countless others on small private wells.

“North County took a huge, huge hit,” says Monterey County Supervisor John Phillips, a Prunedale resident who represents District 2, which encompasses North County. He says he hadn’t seen anything like it in his 45 years of living in the area.

Despite power outages, thousands of residents accessed social media from almost the first moments of the storm, keeping up to date. They helped each other out by offering freezer space, chainsaws, information on where to get bottled water, what roads to avoid, or lost and found animals.

Amanda Young, a Prunedale native, is an administrator of the Prunedale Neighborhood Watch Facebook page, which set up about a year ago. The group has more than 2,500 members, about 14 percent of Prunedale’s population.

Young says she and her neighbors were unprepared for the fierceness of the storm. She was also unprepared for what happened next: an equal and opposite fierce reaction of neighbors coming together like she hasn’t seen in decades.

“My phone and was blowing up with notifications from the group,” she says.

As the rain began to subside on Feb. 21, plans spontaneously erupted on the Facebook page for a community barbecue by early summer. The response was so great, Young shifted the original plan to use a smaller venue like the Prunedale Grange Hall to something bigger, possibly Manzanita Park.

As Prunedale has grown over the years, Young says the lines of communications between neighbors have waned, but the storm is bringing Prunedale back to the one she remembers growing up.

Another Prunedale native and local real estate broker, Chantel Henson, agrees: “I’ve talked to my neighbors in the last week more than I did in the year prior to that,” Henson says.