AUSTIN, Texas — City officials are providing more information regarding a disaster declaration for the City of Austin after a winter storm slammed the area this week.
City of Austin Mayor Kirk Watson will be joined by Travis County Judge Andy Brown and Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk at 3 p.m. at the Combined Transportation, Emergency and Communications Center located off Manor Road.
Watson will provide a progress report to declare a disaster declaration.
According to Brown, the county saw widespread damage but the majority was focused in the western and northwestern corners. Streets have been cleared of trees at this point, but there are still downed trees on homes.
The damage was severe enough throughout the county to warrant a disaster declaration, according to Brown, and it will be filed later in the day on Friday.
"The disaster declaration will make available access to FEMA's Public Assistance Funds, and it will also bring additional State support to our efforts," Brown explained.
This is the first step to accessing the funds, and there are additional steps to assist in clean-up within the county. The threshold to reach FEMA's funds in the county is $5.7 million, and if met, FEMA will reimburse 75% of overall expenses. To reach that amount, the county is able to combine efforts with the City of Austin and other neighboring counties.
Both the county and City will file the declarations separately, but the wording will likely be mirrored in an effort to combine the effort for FEMA funding, Brown stated.
According to the release, "a disaster declaration can help the City draw down additional federal resources for local recovery; in many cases a declaration can also help aid people on private properties and private right of ways."
In addition to the disaster declaration being issued as a way to assist in the restoration efforts, the Texas A&M Forest Service is sending 30 personnel to assist with the winter storm response. The 30 personnel saw crews are currently "gathering situational awareness and assessing the needs this afternoon" according to a tweet on Friday.
At 5 p.m. on Friday, the City Manager Spencer Cronk, Austin Energy General Manager Jackie Sargent, Austin Energy Vice President of Field Operations Elton Richards, Austin-Travis County EMS Chief Robert Luckritz and other department leaders held a press conference discussing further weather responses.
Luckritz went on to say that ATCEMS has seen an increase in all calls, and carbon monoxide exposure calls have double since Friday morning. If residents are going to run a generator, they should do so 20 feet away from their home.
Furthermore, due to the mass power outages, a lot of uncontrolled signals are out. Luckritz is asking residents to treat any of these unlit intersections as a four-way stop, as they become harder to see in the dark.
The trash pick-up routes will be catching up on the backlog Saturday and Austin Resource Recovery has 29 collection crews managing debris clean-up, and more will be added over the weekend and into Monday.
In addition to the Austin Resource Recovery crews, the Public Works team has had crews working on cleaning up the roads to allow Resource Recovery to pick up anything left behind. So far, Public Works has responded to 600 debris requests and are processing a backlog of 500 requests.
Public Works advised residents to not remove tree limbs from public areas and to instead allow professionals that are working as quickly as possible to remove it. Additionally, their crews cannot remove any trees that have fallen onto private property.
Sargent explained that some additional outages have begun to come in, but conditions are continuing to improve, which will assist in restoration efforts.