Panel will look into city’s storm response
A panel appointed by San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg to investigate how the city and its two utilities handled the devastating winter storm last month likely will set its sights on how the city and its utilities communicated with each other and the public before and after the crisis hit.
The panel also wants to know how the city, CPS Energy and San Antonio Water System prepared for the storm and the ensuing fallout.
Nirenberg, council members and residents have all complained they had little information to go on as the prolonged subfreezing weather battered the region.
“We need a central clearing house for communications to the public,” District 10 Councilman Clayton Perry said at the panel’s first meeting Friday.
Hundreds of thousands of residents went hours and days without power, forcing them to huddle in their homes for warmth — and later went without water. It quickly became apparent that not all parts of the city were seeing power outages on an equal basis.
CPS officials have said some neighborhoods share circuits with critical infrastructure such as hospitals and fire stations and thus didn’t see outages.
Making information public about what parts of town are on circuits deemed safe from outages could help residents keep themselves safe in the event of
freezing weather, panelists said.
“You cannot wait until the roads are icy to say, ‘oh, I don’t have heat. Maybe I should go to my mother’s or my son’s,’” Councilwoman Ana Sandoval said. “It just leaves everybody extremely vulnerable.”
Panelists also pointed to lasting economic and health impacts on residents — particularly vulnerable residents including the elderly and the homeless — resulting from the storm as a key area for the board to probe.
“When we talk about damages, are those most vulnerable people today still sucking wind from this enormous kick to the gut?” District 8 Councilman Manny Peláez said.
The panel already has plenty of feedback from the public to go on, judging by calls to 311 and posts on the city’s social media pages, said Ben Gorzell, the city’s chief financial officer who supervises San Antonio Water System and CPS Energy. The city plans to scrub that intel for potential areas to explore and hand it over to the panel.
In addition to former city councilman Reed Williams, the seven-member panel includes four sitting City Council members — Peláez, Sandoval, Perry and Adriana
Rocha Garcia; Lisa Tatum, former Bexar County assistant criminal district attorney; and retired Air Force Gen. Edward Rice.
It’s not clear how long the inquiry will last. But Williams, who’s leading the panel, said he doesn’t want to keep residents waiting on the panel’s conclusions.
“The public needs answers and they need answers now,” Williams said in opening remarks.
At the same time, Williams cautioned members against rushing to conclusions as the panel pursues its inquiries.
“We’re going to recognize there’s a lot we don’t know and we’re going to learn,” said Williams, retired oilman and former San Antonio Water System trustee.
The city has a basic emergency response plan last updated in 2015 that ranks the likelihood of potential disasters such as drought, heat waves and terrorism and what kind of damage they can wreak. The plan puts the likelihood of a winter freeze as “occasional” and the impact on public health and property as “moderate.”
It’s time to revisit that assessment, Rocha Garcia said Friday.
“This hasn’t been revised since ( Julián) Castro was mayor,” she said.