Mark Keough - Montgomery County Judge Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Five fifty three, our time here in distance Morning News. YEP,
real winter hits Houston starting late night tonight, joining us
to talk about it and preparations they're making the Montgomery County.
Here's Judge Markel. Good morning, Judge.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey Jimmy, how are you today?

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Doing fine? How many snowplows do you have in Montgomery County?

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Mark Man, We've got a bunch. They're ready to roll.
We're expecting. We are expecting some snow. Let me tell you,
county's under The county is under a winter storm warning,
as you can imagine, and it's going to go from
six pm tonight through six pm tomorrow. And that's that
is a warning. So we know it's coming, and so

(00:37):
we've directed non essential public safety offices, non essential offices
to be closed. But our public safety and our Office
of Mergercy Management we're up and running. Man, We're prepared
for this.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
So there's only so much you can do because if
you don't have it's not like we have a bunch
of likes. We're kidding about the snowplows. Obviously we don't
have that kind of a qui because we don't normally
need it. But so what kind of preparations, can you.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Do you know we have we we have sanded in
some areas assaulted, but previous as we've done in the past,
we we have taken care of our bridges. You know,
there are some roads that are very, very tough that
we will do with some extra standing on those. But
I don't care what we do in our area. You

(01:27):
by the end of the morning, most of that stuff
will be you know, you run over it enough, you're
on the road. You don't need to be on the road.
And the fact of that is that it goes away.
So we're going to be constantly working at keeping these
roads open and working with TEXTOT as well to help
us to do that.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
Well, obviously you'd like people, Yeah, you'd like people to
stay home if it all humanly possible, even if you
have four wheel drive. I happen to have four wheel drive,
and I've driven in snow before, but if that turns
to ice, four wheel drive won't matter on ice, will it.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
No, that's a problem. Yeah, that's that's true. And the
tree roads are just not going to last the duration
of the winter weather. So we're urging people to limit
their travel to only a central travel as you just mentioned,
so power outages, you know, truthfully, we don't expect it,
but we are prepared and we have warming centers that

(02:17):
are going to be prepared, and we work with our
power companies to be ready. We've also been in contact
with Acting Governor Crichton, who is in contact with us
and is ready to assist and things get worse. So
we've collaborated and planned with all the agencies in our
area and offices throughout the county. You know, we Montgomery

(02:40):
County takes great pride in being prepared. Here. We are
in a situation. We've been watching it, you know. I
ordered this to them to start getting prepared last Wednesday,
and sure enough, Thursday they started really acting on it.
And now we've got an advance of this storm and
disaster declaration has been issued activating our emergency management plans.
And we do that so that we can ensure that

(03:02):
we have resources that are available to us from the states.
But the county is ready.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
What is your biggest concern post storm? Are you concerned
about frozen pipes at schools and other public buildings for example?

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Oh? Yeah, yeah, but we have a hard freeze like this.
We experienced this a couple of years ago and the
I sat at the Office of Emergency Management and talk
people off the ledge. It was amazing the amount of
pipes that were broken. It's a great concern to us.
The schools are going to be closed, and so you know,
in terms of the safety of the kids on the road,

(03:36):
I think the biggest thing is is that if we can,
if we just hope and pray that we won't have
freezing rain, but we can't guarantee that, and we can't
guarantee that if it does, know that it won't melt
and then freeze again. That's the big concern. Now you
have a very dangerous situation where there's ice on the roads,
and it can be very tough on people. So we
just urge people to if they're able to stay inside,

(03:58):
stay at home and just wait this out.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
All right, Judge, thanks as always, do appreciate it. Stay
warm and stay safe.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Thank you, all right, Jimmy, thank you you've been.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Montgomery County Judge Marko. It's five fifty seven on news
radio seven forty k t RH