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Wednesday, August 25, 1999

City set for long cleanup
Brush crews will work 7 days a week
By James A. Suydam
Caller-Times

Clearing the city of Hurricane Bret's calling cards - brush that has littered streets and yards and is piling up on curbsides throughout the city - will take weeks as crews work seven days a week and with help from crews from Alabama.
   Since Monday, solid waste crews have gotten 70 calls to clear downed trees off the roads and sidewalks. All crews can do to keep pace at this point is clear the roads, cut up the trees and stack them to the side of the road for later removal.
   Helen Holloway, a 76-year-old resident in the 800 block of Anderson Street, said Bret's real legacy will be rotting piles of brush and debris such as the remains of the Chinese tallow from her back yard.
   "It ruins the looks of our street. It's not on my grass. It's on my curb, and it's going to be a mess for people trying to drive their cars," said Holloway, who expected a long wait because brush crews had just been to her neighborhood last week.
   Holloway considered hiring someone to haul it off for her, but said it cost too much.
   "So, I guess I'll just have to get used to looking at it for a while," she said.
   City Solid Waste Director Andy Leal said the city's four brush crews will work seven days a week to clean up the mess. And the city's 36 garbage crews will work seven days a week, picking up some light brush each day.
   But residents can make the task go quicker by cutting brush into sticks less than five feet long and bundling them so that city garbage crews can handle it.
   Officials also have brought in two brush crews from Auburn, Ala., which will work the area north of Holly Road to Corpus Christi Bay and east of Weber and Doddridge to Oso Bay. The crews started Tuesday.
   Each crew consists of two brush loaders and four dump trucks, Leal said.
   The anticipated cost: $200,000. And the federal government will reimburse the city for about 75 percent.
   City officials selected this area for the additional Alabama crews because the area has more trees and likely more fallen limbs.
   "And if they finish and we still need some more help, then we'll consider sending them to another part of the city," Leal said.
   The city's four brush crews will continue working their regular rotation of the city, moving from the central area of Corpus Christi toward the northwest end of town before beginning again back at Padre Island, which typically would take about six weeks.
   Those who can't wait can dump for free Saturday and Sunday at the J.C. Elliott. All that's required is proof of residence and patience for what could be long lines and muddy roads at the landfill.
   Power outages
   Hundreds of residents - many of them in area communities - also still lack basic services.
   The power blinked off at Willie Lanehart's home on Corpus Christi's Darcey Drive on Sunday evening, just after Hurricane Bret made its way onto the shores of South Texas.
   It took two days for the lights to come back on.
   "They told me it would get fixed, and I've called and my wife's called," Lanehart said hours before his power was restored Tuesday night. "It's pretty depressing because we heard the island got its power back, and I feel really sorry for the people in Falfurrias, but here we are in the middle of the city - and nothing."
   Bret caused less than $100,000 in property damage, according to city officials, but it knocked down power lines across the city, resulting in more than 24,000 power outage calls to Central Power and Light.
   Most of the Corpus Christi outages occurred in area located between Shoreline Boulevard nd South Padre Island Drive, and from the Crosstown Expressway to Ennis Joslin Road.
   By Tuesday night, 36 CPL customers in Corpus Christi remained without electricity, but officials said they hoped to have the repairs made before this morning. Elsewhere, 350 were in the dark in Alice and Kingsville combined. Two hundred were without power in Premont, 50 in Armstrong, 800 in Falfurrias and fewer than 10 in Hebbronville, said Jessica Mahaffey, company spokeswoman.
   The company restored power to all north Padre Island residents by 2:45 p.m. Tuesday, officials said.
   The cost of powering up
   Gonzalo Sandoval, CPL president, said an additional 225 workers from across the region have been called in, costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in overtime to repair the damage.
   The process has been slowed by the type of outages that occurred in the storm.
   Outages usually are caused by problems in main lines or substations, which affect whole neighborhoods, Mahaffey said.
   Hurricane Bret caused sporadic damage, mostly linked to tree limbs downing lines to homes.
   "There are wires entangled in tree limbs and we are going house by house and untangling the limbs," Mahaffey said.
   Ken Griffin, area business manager for CPL, said the need to restore power first to basic services, such as power for water and wastewater systems, then emergency services and then hospitals, shelters and other public places means that individual homes are last on the list for crews to fix.
   Brooks County is in a more serious situation, Mahaffey said. There, poles were knocked down and whole sections of lines need to be replaced, she said.
   About 1,500 individuals in Corpus Christi remained without phone service Tuesday, said Amber White, spokeswoman for Southwestern Bell. Extra crews are being brought to the city to perform repair work. She said telephone service for all customers should be restored by 11 a.m. today.Getting back to normal
   The upper Coastal Bend counties of San Patricio, Aransas, Refugio and Bee suffered minor wind damage, reporting mostly fallen trees and some power outages and a few damaged roofs, officials said. Some city officials in those counties still were assessing the damage Tuesday, but most reported no interruptions in city services.
   Kenedy County regained its phone and electric services at about 4 p.m. Tuesday, said Kenedy County Sheriff Rafael Cuellar.
   "No one was killed and what I think saved us is we had people in shelters way before it came in," Cuellar said. "I believe someone upstairs was watching out for us."
   A lot of trees were damaged, but fortunately when they fell under the wind pressure, they landed in streets and not on property, Cuellar said. But Sarita officials are concerned that if Falfurrias continues to flood, the water will back up into Sarita and cause flooding, he said.
   In Alice, Mayor Fidel Rul Jr. said city personnel worked throughout Sunday and Monday night, costing the city overtime. The city's sewage treatment plants are not manned at night, but the city stationed workers there during the storm in case of emergencies. Rainwater threatened to overwhelm the city's southside plant's capacity, Rul said, but workers were able to fix the problem before sewage backed up.
   The cleanup
   Firefighters also were on standby throughout the storm to deal with downed power lines, Rul said. As many as seven trees knocked down power lines during the storm, he said.
   "We're going to have to work our people 10 or 12 hours a day the next few days to pick up debris and help with downed trees," Rul said. "We will help residents with their downed trees."
   Rul estimated the cleanup could take as long as a week.
   Hurricane Bret sent about 500 people to shelters at Adams Junior High School and Noonan Elementary, Rul said, though he estimated half were from Corpus Christi, Robstown, Kingsville and Agua Dulce.
   Heavy rains caused some minor street flooding, Rul said.
   Flooding was a problem in Premont, especially at the south end of the county, said Lt. Richard Miller of the Jim Wells County Sheriff's Department.
   "It's still flooding there," Miller said. "They got more of the storm. They're about 10 or 12 miles north of Falfurrias."
   In Kleberg County, some electricity had yet to be restored, but the rest of the county's power and phone service had been restored Monday, about 24 hours after it had gone out, said Allen May, Kleberg County judge.
   Live Oak and McMullen counties were spared damage, and power and phone service is available countywide.



Staff writers Stephanie L. Jordan, Ruth Cochran-Escamilla and Guy Lawrence contributed to this report. Staff writer James A Suydam can be reached at 886-3618 or by e-mail at suydamj@caller.com

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