Cold Weather and Good Neighbors

 Last week the weather in Texas and the surrounding states decided to go off its meds and freeze the heck out of everything and almost everybody!  South Texas hasn't seen temperatures this cold, that came on this fast, and stayed this long since the 1800s.  And Texas wasn't ready for it...

Fish that didn't make it out to deeper waters froze to death.

Sea turtles that stayed in the bays were stunned by the frigid water temps and those that weren't rescued and brought to a rehab center sank to the bottom and drowned.  (But in our area almost 4,000 sea turtles were rescued and have now been returned to the warmer waters of the Gulf).

The power grid went down...I saw an article where they blamed it on water supplies freezing...I don't know if it's true, but if it is, then they definitely weren't prepared!

And there was really no way to prepare for the frozen water lines and mains...being so close to the Gulf makes the water table here really high, so water lines and mains are not very deep at all...and homes here just aren't built for hard freezes.

We have neighbors here in the park who live in mobile homes.  The pipes under their homes aren't insulated for the cold...people did their best to try to prepare, but there's just no way.  One couple who we are close with have a heat pump/AC unit...but below 40F, the heat pump just shuts down...so they had no heat at all!  We brought them the propane heater from our boat to use to stay warm...they weren't warm, but at least their house didn't freeze!

Then in the middle of it all, not only did the power go out, but the water system froze and broke!  So that pretty much hosed everybody who was trying to keep their water dripping so it wouldn't freeze their pipes.  Folks were using the burners on their gas stoves to heat their homes...while this is somewhat dangerous, it was their only option!

Not a lot of people had generators, but it wouldn't have done them a whole lot of good water wise...pipes were gonna bust no matter what.  But the folks with generators could at least get some heat inside.

We were really lucky in that being from Montana, and having lived multiple winters in Montana in our motorhome, we were pretty much unaffected by the weather.  We had a full tank of diesel which runs both our generator and our Aquahot system which is our water heater and also is our source of heat. When we heard that we'd be cold, we filled our fresh water tank to 60%.  So we had heat, water, and power.  We were the lucky ones.

When we got to Rockport, we joined the local community Facebook group.  The people in the community were offering help wherever they could, and when a request for help was posted, it was answered pretty fast with multiple offers.  This is a tight-knit and amazing community!

The worst thing that happened around me was that on the second day of the freeze, I was looking out the window, and saw some black smoke not too far off.  The smoke got thicker, and I went outside.  As I was walking to see what was burning, there was a loud explosion...a bumper-pull trailer was in full flames and something had exploded.  (it turns out that it was probably the refrigerator cooling unit...the neighbors had already grabbed the propane tanks off of the trailer)

Right then, a fire truck blew past me, and then another...they were really quick to get set up and start dousing the flames...but it was already too late to save any part of the trailer...it was a total loss.  The firefighters managed to keep the flames from damaging any surrounding trailers.

It turns out that the trailer was owned by a young family with a baby and a little boy.  Thankfully, they weren't home when the fire started or it could have been much worse!!  Because there wasn't any heat or water, they had gone to stay with family in the next town.

After the trailer fire was out, we went back home...and pretty soon there was a knock on the door...it was our neighbor with a bucket collecting money to give to the family.  There were about 6 people canvassing the park, collecting for them.  When it was all said and done, in just about 2 hours, these 6 folks collected about $1700!  The young man who owned the trailer was in tears when he saw how much money had been collected from people in the park whom he had never even met!

All in all, I have been amazed and impressed with how the residents in our park, and also the people of Rockport and Aransas Pass can pull together and are so willing to help each other out in the blink of an eye...it just goes to show that there are good people out there!