TRI-COUNTY — As the snow melted, power came back on and warmer weather returned to the tri-county, residents grappled with the damage brought by last week’s winter storm and statewide power failures, while also working to put their lives back in order.
The predominant mood in Marfa this week was shock, as residents and businesses assessed the damage from busted water lines and extended power outages. At press time, businesses across the city — from Porter’s grocery store to Do Your Thing coffee shop — were still getting back on their feet and figuring out their next moves.
While residents and business owners are documenting their losses and filing insurance claims, the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM) is asking them to report the damages to http://TDEM.Texas.gov/warm, in hopes of opening up more federal relief funds.
At press time, Presidio, Brewster and Jeff Davis counties have not been included under the federal disaster assistance program, despite efforts by Governor Greg Abbott to secure disaster assistance for all 254 Texas counties.
Trae Porter, a member of the ownership team at regional grocery chain Porter’s, estimated lost inventory across stores at around $10,000. But “we’re still trying to figure it out,” he said in a phone interview on Monday.
Porter’s flagship store in Andrews has a generator, which allowed the company to save food it might have otherwise had to throw out. Other locations, including in Midland and Big Spring, maintained power at least well enough to not shed inventory.
But locations across the tri-county — including stores in Alpine, Marfa and Ft. Davis — did lose power for extended periods. In those cases, the store had to either throw out food or give it away before it went bad. The Porter’s in Marfa donated much of its perishables to Marfa ISD, where Superintendent Oscar Aguero had helped set up a warming station.
“The instruction was, do not throw away anything that anybody can use,” Porter said. “Just give it away.” The company did its best during the crisis to keep track of that inventory, but Porter says that wasn’t the company’s goal during the days of no power last week. “Whenever folks are hungry, we’re going to feed them.”
If the company could get reimbursed for the lost products, “even better,” Porter said. But at press time, the company was still figuring out that process.
“They take your payment really well,” he joked of insurance companies, “but when it goes the other way, it’s a much slower process.” But still, he stressed, the lost inventory “wasn’t something that would kill us or anything.” And after losing power at his own home, he was just glad the winter storm was over.
“I was grateful for our wood-burning fireplace,” Porter said of his house in Midland.
On the east side of town, The Get Go also lost power. Like Porter’s, the company donated much of its perishable food to Marfa ISD. It also turned to StellinaMart, which helped the grocery store salvage some of its pricier deli meats and cheeses with a walk-in fridge that managed to maintain temperatures.
“Right now,” employee Irma Salgado said on Tuesday, “all of our coolers and most of our produce is gone.” It was all-hands-on-deck at the store that day, as workers helped unload products from a semi into the store.
“I’m just glad we survived it and made it through,” Salgado said. She’d lost power at her own house. Her husband used a generator to keep the fridge and freezer powered, but “by Wednesday, it went completely dead.”
Thinking the outage might last through the week, her husband drove to El Paso to buy another one. In El Paso, “nobody had generators,” Salgado said. But thankfully, she said, the family hadn’t lost any food. “Our freezer never defrosted,” she said. “I had my milk and perishables in an ice chest.”
Some families lost all the food in their fridge — and the Marfa Food Pantry stepped in to help out. On Friday, a truck from the West Texas Food Bank showed up with a large shipment of food, including “pallet after pallet” of tomatoes and peppers, said volunteer Peggy O’Brien. Then, on Saturday, the food bank did an “emergency distribution.”
In total, O’Brien said, the food pantry gave out 180 boxes — enough food for a total of 540 people. It showed how many people were in need. “That’s a huge percentage of our population,” she said.
With the winter storm compounding on top of the coronavirus pandemic, O’Brien wasn’t sure how many hungry families were struggling through one or both of those crises. “We didn’t drill into that data,” she said. She just knew local families were in need.
The Marfa Food Pantry also lost power last week — in a stroke of quick thinking, Elbert Bassham, the programs manager, ran over and plugged the fridge and freezer into a generator. “He’s very industrious,” O’Brien said. “We didn’t lose anything in the freezers.”
Not all food businesses in Marfa dealt with lost inventory. At the Do Your Thing coffee shop, co-owner Simone Rubi said she was “really scared” they would have to toss much of the dairy and food in the fridge.
It stayed so cold, though, that in the end, Do Your Thing kept most of its products. “We lost a case of half-and-half and maybe a couple other things,” she said. “It wasn’t a huge loss.”
Instead, Rubi and her husband Rob Gungor, the other co-owner, found themselves dealing with other winter storm-induced headaches. A pipe had burst in the cold, flooding their coffee shop.
“Water was rushing out the front door,” Rubi said. “It was going along the bottom of the wall. We worried it was going to mess up the drywall and cause mold or something.” They called a repairman, who temporarily fixed the problem, and shut off their water lines. But then leaks started up again, and someone else on the property turned the water back on. Water started running out of the store again.
The worst part, Rubi said, was feeling powerless to fully fix the problem. Plumbers across the city and state were busy, and neither she nor Gungor had the know-how to fix the pipes. “You’re super vulnerable,” she said. “You’re sitting there seeing water rushing out, and there’s nothing you can do.”
At press time, Do Your Thing was back open for business. But according to the company’s lease, they’re responsible for any plumbing issues. Their landlord offered to split any repair bills with them, which helped. But at press time, Rubi and Gungor were still figuring out what to do.
“You might be able to tell from my voice: I’m trying to just be cool,” Rubi said. “It was a very difficult time.”
Rubi was happy about the latest round of Paycheck Protection Program loans, which opened in January. After the storm, the timing was perfect, she said. “We’re hoping that can help us,” she said. “We’ll take whatever we can get.”
Business owners and residents across Texas are looking for additional resources to return to normal, and some options have become available since the event.
On February 12, Governor Abbott declared a state of disaster for all of Texas’ 254 counties, paving the way for his February 18 request to President Joe Biden for public assistance, individual assistance and the hazard mitigation grant program for the entirety of Texas.
So far, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has declared a major disaster in 108 Texas counties, despite pleas from the governor to extend the federal individual assistance relief to all counties in the state.
“The governor wouldn’t have requested all 254 if we didn’t believe we qualified for the assistance,” said Seth Christensen, a spokesperson for TDEM. After initially getting 77 counties listed, the governor successfully re-requested an additional 31 counties be covered, and plans to ask for more soon.
To continue petitioning the federal government to cover the rest of Texas counties, including the tri-counties, TDEM is counting on locals to submit impact photos and details of damage or financial losses, using the Texas Individual Assistance Reporting Tool.
“The state of Texas will work with FEMA,” Christensen said, “but we need Texans to give us the information they have on the ground so we can show them, ‘We knew there was damage, here it is.’”
At Do Your Thing, dealing with busted water pipes and power outages on top of the pandemic felt like being kicked “when we were down,” Rubi said. But at the same time, “we’ve sort of got this numbness now, because of COVID.”
“We were just so thrilled to open back up,” she said. “We’re just trying to have positive vibes. Let’s try not to think about what happened.”
In Alpine, Sul Ross State University also dealt with damage from water lines. At least two dorm buildings were damaged, spokesperson Dean Wilkinson said, as were a couple other buildings.
At press time, though, SRSU is still assessing the damage and figuring out its next move. Wilkinson said he was waiting on a building-status report from the SRSU physical plant.
“We’re being careful to go through each building, to document each and every piece of damage,” he said. “We’re in the process of compiling that data.” SRSU hoped to use insurance to pay for the damages. But the school’s top priority after the storm was getting displaced students from the Gallego Center, where they’d been sheltering, back to their dorms “as fast as possible.”
All things considered, Kendall Weir, owner of Stop and Read Books in Marfa, considers herself lucky. A pipe burst in the shop bathroom, flooding her tiny bookstore with around two inches of water.
By the time she got there, “it was like a humidity box,” she said. “Books were warped. The windows were fogged.” But some friends — including local residents and fellow business owners Coleman Morris-Goodrick and Jennifer Esperanza — helped clean up the mess. In the end, Weir estimated she lost around $400 in merchandise. She didn’t plan to file an insurance claim.
“It was very frustrating to have the loss of income,” Weir said, “but that’s everyone.” When power went out at her house on Monday, a friend offered her place to stay.
The same thing happened at her bookstore, where she and friends were able to quickly get the water damage under control. “Everyone’s in it together,” she said of the winter storm. “The community really pulled together.”