With blankets, backpacks and a few pillows, Brownsville residents were seen exiting the Sports Park warming center after being told it was no longer going to be 24 hours.
A day earlier, the City of Brownsville announced the opening of the 24-hour warming center where residents could stay warm, charge their phones and even bring their pets in kennels.
“My son is a veteran who needs electricity for his ventilator,” said a 60-year-old resident as she walked to her car with her son. “I was here for hours and then they told us we had to leave because they’re closing at 9.”
The resident, who wished to stay anonymous, said she has been without power since Monday morning and got to the center early Thursday after hearing Brownsville Mayor Trey Mendez talk about it on the press conference that was held on the same day.
When asked why the center changed the hours of operation, Public Information Officer Felipe Romero said four more locations for warming up have been added to different areas in the city. He said they also wanted to be cognizant that these shelters are for warming up and charging devices.
Brownsville City Manager Noel Bernal said during a phone interview on Thursday evening that to make this decision they used the data they collected from BPUB throughout the day about the outages and the areas.
“We used the data that we had as of today, and we’ve broken up into districts ,and geographically, and we ended up expanding services to reflect what the outage information reflected,” Bernal said.
“We actually expanded the total number of hours, and we actually have a lot more staff that we’ve allocated to these different facilities. Because our data showed what districts had more outages where we needed to have more presence.”
Bernal added that while there are isolated outages throughout the city, the total number of outages has been significantly reduced. He said having several warming-centers throughout the city serves more people than having just one 24 hours.
“Our decision was also ‘how do we serve more people?’ the Mayor had his press release at 10, but the decision was based on more information that we were able to gather and use for decision-making throughout the day,” he said.
“Also, please note this is an evolving situation and we seek to best provide services to citizens.”
Here are the four warming centers that will be open until 9 p.m.:
- Brownsville Sports Park (1000 Sports Park Blvd.
- Brownsville Golf Center (1800 W San Marcelo Blvd.
- Brownsville Events Center (1 Events Center Blvd.
- Joe & Tony Oliveira Park (104 El Paso Road, Blvd.
This article has been updated as more information became available from Brownsville City Manager Noel Bernal.
