SAN ANTONIO — Thursday night's scaffolding collapse in Downtown San Antonio damaged part of the historic St. Mark's Episcopal church. Church leaders are now assessing the damage while scrambling to get ready for Sunday's upcoming service.
- Parish structure severely damaged
- Church was built in the 1920s
- Costs have yet to be determined
The toppled over scaffolding damaged part of the parish house's roof and knocked out a couple of windows panels due to debris from the mangled scaffolding.
"Clearly a lot of the scaffolding and the debris from the scaffolding actually went into that atrium area so there’s some damage within that inner sort of tunnel," said Reverend Beth Knowlton. "That also appears to be where our major water incursion happened and so on that particular end of the parish house, there’s water on kind of all the floors."
The parish house of the church which holds classrooms, meeting spaces, and other administrative offices did suffer a lot of water damage inside along with some structural damage to the exterior of the building. Church leaders say the historic worship center luckily didn't face any damage though.
The parish house itself was built in the 1920s and the cost to fix this building has yet to be determined. Currently both the parish house and the main worship center are without air conditioning due to the damage on the roof breaking the chiller of the church.
Right now church leaders are telling their congregation of more than 1,000 people that church will still go on this upcoming Sunday with one combined service at 10 a.m. Nobody was inside of the church when the scaffolding collapsed around 9:30 p.m. Thursday.
A lot of people stopped by to check out the damage for themselves.
"Never in my life have I seen anything like this," Juan Martinez said.
Martinez works as a laborer at the former AT&T building.
"We do the remodeling, we do the restoration with the brick and replacing terracotta, and we were just out here yesterday," he said.
Martinez says he's only been working here for a few months.
"It took about a month for the scaffolders to get set up, that's what they told me, and we've been working here for quite a while," he said.
While he's glad people weren't seriously hurt, he's not feeling too good about being out of a job.
"Not too good. Bills need to be paid," he said.
In the meantime, he'll wait for the next job or to finish this one.