San Antonio officials say they’re ready as temperatures dip into 20s overnight

It still remains to be seen what kind of winter weather we’ll see in the next few hours as the city remains under a winter weather advisory, but San Antonio and Bexar County services are prepared for the worst. Deputy City Manager Maria Villagomez says that’s because the city learned its lesson from the winter storm of February 2021.

The city of San Antonio and Bexar County gave a joint update Thursday on the status of city roads, infrastructure and services with representatives from CPS Energy, SAWS and VIA Metropolitan. While wintry precipitation has held off for now, Villagomez says the National Weather Service expects says chances of precipitation will increase from from 30 percent to 50 percent late into the afternoon.

“Those chances are projected to decrease over night and we anticipate to be dry for the rest of the night and into Friday,” Villagomez says.

As of 3:30 p.m., the latest situation report from the National Weather Service called for a wintry mix of rain, freezing rain and sleet tonight across the southern part of South Central Texas with temperatures in the area dropping into the 20s and upper teens.

She says that even if there is wintry precipitation, winds will be strong enough to keep rain and ice off the power lines — one of the causes of outages during Winter Storm Uri.

Interim CPS Energy CEO Rudy Garza says it has been pretty quiet since the cold front blew in last night. As of this afternoon there were only two outages affecting less than five customers. He says the ERCOT’s power grid has well over 7,200 megawatts of capacity and all of CPS Energy’s plants are running smoothly since the power load hasn’t been too high.

“Our crews are ready to go and our vehicles are fueled up,” Garza says.

SAWS has also had a pretty quiet day so far, says president and CEO Robert Puente. Instead, SAWS has been communicating with customers on how to weatherize and insulate water pipes.

TxDOT’s District Engineer Gina Gallegos says crews will be working throughout to pretreat major roads and highways throughout the night and will have crews on standby to address common trouble spots.

As for the four warming centers, Villagomez says those centers will remain open until noon on Friday, January 21 while the city will actively watch to see if more are needed. Those that need transportation to the warming centers can call 311.

Many people experiencing homelessness decided to ride out February’s record-shattering winter storm in their tents.

Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News

She says that the Department of Human Services is doing outreach with volunteer organizations to get San Antonio’s houseless community into shelters.

“We did learn from Winter Storm Uri last year,” Villagomez says. “This has been a good exercise for all of us. The weather is very unpredictable. We don’t know how things can change, so we’re prepared for that.”