Downtown Houston streets remain closed as crews clear falling glass after last week's storm
HOUSTON - Danger in downtown. Several streets are still shut down in Downtown Houston as glass continues to fall from broken out windows there. The storm-ravaged skyscrapers are quite a sight.
The storm turned windows into thick, sharp-edged potential weapons and the panes plunging from several stories high certainly could kill, so streets and sidewalks near the buildings with broken windows and falling glass have been closed.
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"Most of the glass has fallen, probably 95% of the glass has fallen, but we don't want there to be any possibility of somebody to get hit by fallen glass. You can imagine what that would do to somebody," explains Kris Larson CEO of Central Houston Inc.
So many roads are closed in Downtown, just like the intersection at Milam and McKinney, because a lot of buildings have a lot of broken windows. You can almost stand in one spot, and looking from one building to another, you’ll see dozens of broken out windows.
"Most of the damage occurred here in this portion of downtown, really the southwest portion of downtown, south of McKinney Street, generally west of Main Street and then east of Smith," Larson explains.
"It's scary. It’s like you see it in pictures and I see it now, and it's like, is this real," says Stephanie, who works Downtown.
"In addition to all of our teams, we've had city resources, major heavy machinery. We've brought in independent contractors to help with some of that work," Larson adds.
As crews continue to clean up the falling glass, streets and sidewalks in Downtown are expected to be shut down through Memorial Day, and all of the busted windows should at least be boarded up by then, but that won't mean every bit of glass is gone.
"Just like when the Astros win, we find confetti for months. We're probably going to keep finding these little, small pieces of glass for weeks or months," Larson adds.
Larson wants to stress, only streets in the Southwest quadrant are closed. Downtown is open for business. The Houston Astros are playing on Wednesday night and there’s a comic book convention at GRB this weekend.
