Winter Storm Goliath: Buildings, Businesses Continue to Rebuild
Leslie Adami
When Winterstorm Goliath struck the South Plains, it left several residents stuck at home, perhaps even shoveling snow out of their driveways. Meanwhile, businesses had to close their doors as a result of the storm damage.
“Walking through this court this time last year would have been impossible so it’s really nice today to have a brightly lit accessible court with lots of shoppers,” said Beth Bridges, property manager of the South Plains Mall. “We closed the mall that day which was a good thing because later that night of course we had a roof collapse.”
The roof had collapsed at the north court of the mall in front of the women’s Dillard’s. Bridges shared that it took roughly around three weeks to completely rid the area of debris, and within the time span of four months, a completely new roof was installed.
“The silver lining of all of this since the mall was closed, is that noone was injured. There were injuries other than property damage so we’re not lucky in that perspective, so it could have been much worse,” said Bridges, who also shared that at the time of the blizzard, the mall was undergoing renovations and that the blizzard in some ways helped expedite the process.
Haverty’s Furniture store located off of 74th and Quaker was also another business that suffered at the expense of the blizzard, so much so, that construction workers are still working on the exterior of the building. The new Haverty’s is expected to open back up in February 2017.
Across town, the Texas Tech athletic bubble also collapsed due to the heavy weight of snow. Robert Giovannetti, Texas Tech Senior Associate Athletics Director, said while Texas Tech athletics was already planning to build a new sports complex in its place, the bubble came down a lot sooner than expected.
“We had intended on tearing the ATC down starting in March so it kinda just expedited things for us. No one got hurt, we had great stuff, things cleared out and actually started the process of this structure being built a little sooner.”
Currently going up in its place is a new sports performance center funded by the campaign for Fearless Champions, that will house a 100 yard indoor football field. An indoor track will allow the complex to host Big 12 Championships. Not only will the complex be able to hold more activities, but the structure itself will be a lot stronger too.
“You’re apples and oranges to the new facility with the fabric roof and held up a lot by air pressure this is just completely high tech different kind of building that what the other building was. If everything goes as planned, we don’t have any huge weather events, it’ll be good to go starting in August of 17.”
So while many local businesses and buildings didn’t get to experience the best start to 2016, property managers are now looking forward to ringing in the new year with no blizzard in the forecast anytime soon.
“It’s definitely a better start to 2017 for sure,” said Bridges.