Cities south of Amarillo working to recover from ongoing storms

AMARILLO, Texas (KFDA) - The storms are causing some cities south of Amarillo to address reoccurring weather damage problems.

Canyon City officials say they’ve known about a drainage issue at Hunsley Road for several years now.

They’ve been planning to fix it, but haven’t yet because of the expense to fix the problem.

But ongoing storms have caused further erosion to the area and it has now become a safety issue.

“It’s in an area of the road that gets pretty steep and of course when you get a lot of rain, it kind of concentrates itself in the ditches and so you get erosion. Basically, what’s happened is its eroded to the point where the driveway going into a small subdivision out there is in danger of collapse. It’s not there yet but if we have several more storms like this, without being attended to, we can have some problems with access to this one subdivision,” said Dan Reese, public works director for the city of Canyon.

Today the city set out traffic control devices to warn people driving in the area and they plan to get it fixed by this fall.

“There’s actually a set of drawings that has been completed by our city engineer and we will definitely be looking at proceeding probably within the next six to nine months to do some work on that road to fix this problem,” said Reese.

In Timbercreek Canyon, water made its way over a bridge, flooding the area and stopping traffic.

I spoke with the Mayor, Bill Young, and he told me this is not the first time it’s happened.

The water stream flows through the village of Palisades and into the back end of Lake Tanglewood.

According to the water meters, the water is running two feet above the bridge.

Young tells me they usually open the road back up to vehicles when the water runs one foot above the bridge.

He says it’s hard to tell when the water flow will stop.

City officials would also like to remind you not to stand near or climb into sink holes or eroded portions of streets as the soil in those areas is loose and unstable, which could lead to injury.

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