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City surveying damage caused by flood at Salado Creek

The flood water is gone but the damage it caused to San Antonio neighborhood streets, sidewalks and bridges is still being calculated.

SAN ANTONIO — The flood water is gone but the damage it caused to San Antonio neighborhood streets, sidewalks and bridges is still being calculated.

On Salado Creek on the east side of the city, the bridge spanning the creek on Seguin Road bears witness to the power of water.

A section of the bank was ripped away by the flood, and the sidewalk has been undercut.

One segment of the sidewalk has collapsed and others are suspended in mid-air, with nothing underneath them to support the structure.

Debris still chokes the channel so it's unclear if bridge supports have been damaged as well.

Downstream in Martin Luther King Park, the underside of a low water crossing bridge is jammed with three huge trees that became tangled in a mess of litter.
When the creek roared out of its banks, the water's surface was wild but it's what's underneath that does the damage.

When litter builds up and chokes bridges, bigger debris becomes trapped too, putting infrastructure at risk.

Yvi Hernandez of the San Antonio River Authority said "We try to keep it as clean as possible so the water can move as it needs to."

To that end, SARA has launched an initiative they call Don't Let Litter Trash Your River

"If we don't mitigate the problem soon enough, if we don't start doing something now, it could get worse," Hernandez said.

The city's Public Works division has no dollar damage estimate yet, but they say city crews will be busy for weeks identifying problem spots and cleaning up the mess.

They encourage residents to call 311 if they discover any stormwater debris that is affecting public property, impeding street traffic or rights-of-way.

Click here to learn more about drainage and flood resources.

Here is a list of projects underway funded by a 2017 bond initiative.


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