City manager proud of Lubbock response to historic storm

LUBBOCK, Texas (KCBD) - Lubbock City Manager, Jarrett Atkinson says he’s proud of the way the Hub City handled operations before and during these recent winter storm blasts.

“It’s like we’ve said before, we always strive to do the best job possible, and we are always going to learn little things here and there that we are going to do better next time,” Atkinson said.

The Emergency Operations Center activated last Wednesday and then turned into a 24/7 operation two days later on Friday.

“We’re just now beginning to wind down a little bit,” he said.

Atkinson says one of their biggest accomplishments over the past week was powering the water system through generators, taking it off the power grid when loads were critical.

“When we did that, we took a little over three megawatts of load off of the power grid, which certainly helped to at least minimize some of the rolling outages that we had.”

Atkinson says all of the city streets were continuously salted and plowed by the City’s fleet, which uses five spreaders and 10 combination spreader and plow trucks, along with other equipment and vehicles.

“I don’t have the most recent total, but I would imagine we’re at around 1,400 tons of sand that had been put on city streets.”

Atkinson says the main focus of the city now is on water repairs, repairs to pipes and meters. He said 600 calls have come in the past 48 hours, compared to 25 to 30 calls on a regular day.

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