Residents, city crews busy with cleanup after Thursday's storms

SAN ANTONIO – The storms in the Alamo City are over for now, but homeowners and community members are still dealing with the aftermath and the debris.

City crews have been working through the night and into Friday morning, using everything from chainsaws to large-scale cranes to rip, sweep and remove debris from the roads to make them drivable.

One of the extensive early morning cleanup projects took place on Camden Street, where workers got large portions of a tree out of the roadway so local patients could get to a clinic and receive their dialysis treatments.

In other parts of the city, local businesses felt the impact of the storms.

Dan Lee said the roof was ripped off the top of his company's building.

“Water was on the floor. A lot of it drained out, but I’m very blessed. It could have been a lot worse,” said Lee.

Lee and his staff got to work around 6:30 a.m. Friday to start cleaning up the debris from the roof.

“Straight-line winds got ahold of the lip and carried them right off, west to east,” said Lee.

The San Antonio Transportation and Capital Improvements Department sent out its rapid response team to deal with the cleanup.

“We've had over 178 calls where we have actually had so many calls we had to come and cut, stack and remove the debris out of the middle of the road and then go to the next location,” said Joe Conger, of TCI.

Certain areas were so bad, other agencies were called in to help.

“In this situation, we determined there may be a live wire here, so this may be a CPS (Energy) issue. So they get that information and forward it to CPS and the rest of the situations, they come in with their chainsaws, cut it up and remove it as quickly as possible,” said Conger.

On the West Side a billboard toppled over because of yesterday's wind gusts of more than 50 mph. The winds were so strong, they knocked the billboard off its rusted base. It didn't hit anything and no one was hurt, but it missed a church by several inches.