'We just wanted to save lives': During Austin's winter freeze, volunteers led many city-wide relief efforts

The camp underneath Ben White Boulevard and Manchaca Road had fallen eerily quiet. 

“The power had gone out and the wind was blowing up drifts against the tents really, really fast and really, really bad,” Debra Sheffield said. 

In the wee hours of Feb. 15, Sheffield and Andy Kaminsky trudged through shin-deep snow, begging the unhoused Austinites who consider the underpass their home to move to the nearby Travelodge hotel. A coalition of nonprofits brought together by Rubén Cantu’s Community Resilience Trust ATX had secured a block of rooms.  

Sheffield and Kaminsky are not first responders or city officials. Like so many other Central Texans, they are ordinary people who answered a call to help Austin’s most vulnerable residents through the winter storm.

More:Austin food trucks, nonprofits serve up meals, water to residents recovering from Texas freeze

Kaminsky’s company, Runner City, is a service offering food delivery, shopping and errands. The week before, it ran a drive to provide food, blankets and other supplies to the camps.

Sheffield has used the service for odd jobs and saw Kaminsky’s posts. She activated her community network in Round Rock, loaded up her Hyundai Sonata with “all kinds of bags of fresh washed linen from a bunch of mamas” and headed into Austin, she said. 

She spent Feb. 13-14 at the camp, handing out supplies and meeting people. When the roads turned treacherous and the city hunkered down under the weight of the worst winter storm in decades, she stayed. She used her car as a warming station, taking people in one by one to provide relief from the bone-chilling cold. 

“While they were in the car, I just used it to, you know, learn about each person that got in,” she said. She tried to convince camp residents who were worried about their tents being stolen or cleared by the city to go to the hotel. 

More:Four Austin council members demand answers on looming food shortage

The effort came naturally to Sheffield, an ex-military wife with a “big giant mama heart” who has made “working with people that are in distress and in trauma and needing to transition out of bad situations” her life's work, she said. About 3 a.m. Feb. 15, Kaminsky convinced her to go to the hotel. She stayed for a week, working as a liaison between service groups, hotel staffers and people from the camp.

Neighbors come together

It was one of many grassroots efforts to help Austin’s vulnerable citizens during the crisis. Churches around the city opened as warming centers and food distribution hubs. Neighbors came together to offer food staples, space heaters and jugs of water through Buy Nothing Groups and other Facebook communities. Diversity and Wellness in Action, or DAWA, the nonprofit run by rapper and activist Jonathan “Chaka” Mahone, crowd-sourced funds and provided close to $30,000 in direct cash assistance to people in crisis.

More than 400 people without permanent homes were put into hotel rooms after volunteers with Austin Mutual Aid and Survive2Thrive started booking rooms to get people temporarily off the streets during subfreezing temperatures. Bringing everyone to shelters would have been more efficient and less expensive, but the city's shelters filled up so quickly, they had nowhere else to bring people, said Bobby Cooper, founder of Austin Mutual Aid.

"We just wanted to save lives," he said.

Cooper said he was glad to bring aid to these people, but he was also frustrated that the city of Austin didn't do more, especially when it came to getting more people without homes out of subfreezing temperatures. 

"Days before the storm got here, they could have gotten unhoused people off the streets and into shelters or hotels," he said. 

More:How to help, and what to do if you need it, in the aftermath of Texas' historic freeze

‘Wake up and go’

At 1:30 p.m. Friday, Scotty Love was running low on sleep, but his spirits were high as he stood in the narrow shopfront of Lighthouse Kitchen.

The  North Austin restaurant and catering operation was hastily converted into a primary source of hot meals for Austin’s city shelters and warming centers after the winter storm. Since then, it had been “wake up and go,” he said, estimating that he had slept seven hours since the crisis began.  

Love joined the effort after Kaminsky put out a call for someone to make 300 meals for the people he was relocating from camps. Love works with the nonprofit group Backpack Friends, which provides meals to food insecure schoolchildren. He called his friend Phillip Toney of Lighthouse Cuisine and Kitchen, with whom he’s collaborated on other community service projects, to crank out an estimated 3,500 meals a day for those in shelters.

Toney offered his kitchen space and worked as lead chef on the effort. After Love filled the first order, he said, he received a call from City Council Member Natasha Harper-Madison asking him to provide 600 more meals.

For several days, utilities at the kitchen were nonexistent. A generator positioned out front, near a large flower pot where shriveled hibiscus blooms hung from frost-beaten branches, provided power to appliances. There was no heat. When volunteers dropped off a large water tank Thursday night it seemed like an end to the kitchen’s water woes, but the pump was frozen.

So Love started Friday on his hands and knees, using his mouth to siphon water through the tubes into buckets for over an hour so the kitchen could begin operations. 

'I have blisters on both my lips and my tongue,” he said.

‘This looks like the worst one’

Austin's first responders, meanwhile, were also working around the clock — and off the clock — to help people in need. The Austin Fire Department's union opened its community hall to serve as a shelter, and the Austin Police Department's union fed those sheltering at the Givens Recreation Center. 

Bob Nicks, president of the Austin Firefighters Association, gave out his personal cellphone number on KXAN — probably not the smartest idea, in hindsight, he joked — and constantly responded to calls for help along with other volunteer firefighters long after their shifts were over. 

"I would look at my texts and say, ‘OK, this looks like the worst one. Let's get this person into a shelter or taken to a relative's house,’ ” Nicks said. 

He got calls from people who couldn't get through to 911, he said, including a couple in their 70s who had 2 inches of water on the floor of their apartment after a pipe burst. He dispatched volunteer firefighters to that couple to help them out.

"There are so many stories like that," he said. 

"Being someone homeless in the city of Austin is seriously difficult," Whitney, a former outreach minister who is living in one of the encampments under a highway in North Austin, said at a news conference arranged by Community Resilience Trust ATX on Saturday. Whitney, who did not give her last name, said she was thankful for the "overwhelming outpouring of support" from the community.

"Different efforts that have been made from the city to move us out from the encampments, so that we're not physically visible to the community" have been "traumatizing," she said. 

'We're not first responders'

Nonprofit leaders praised the way their community service groups and individuals came together in life-saving efforts to get people off the streets. But some questioned why the city didn't provide more resources and shelters after the storm.

Cooper, of Austin Mutual Aid, said that a week before the crisis his clients in camps around the city began expressing concerns about the coming storm. He said they know “better than anyone else how dangerous the weather is.”

Cooper said his group tried to get the attention of city officials to get more shelters open, but they were “completely flummoxed” by Feb. 12, when the city’s shelters had less than 400 beds for 2,500 unhoused people. 

“The city dropped the ball on this,” Cooper said. 

Because of their close relationship with the camps they visit daily, his team members became first responders as the situation on the ground became critical.

“But of course, we're not first responders,” he said. 

His group has 50 drivers who worked full time during the week, he said. On Feb. 14, as the storm bore down, his volunteers fanned out around the city to pick people up. Some of them got into crashes, he said. 

“And then they just got another vehicle and went out again,” he said.

None of Austin Mutual Aid's volunteers was seriously injured. Cooper said his group took people to hotels because there were no shelters. 

“There was no emergency backup plan,” he said, noting that large city facilities like the Millennium entertainment complex were not open until much later in the week. “We had to save lives that way.”

Sareta Davis, chair of the city’s Human Rights Commission, said the Community Resilience Trust gave her a lifeline when she was without power for close to five days and the temperature in her apartment dropped to 19 or 20 degrees.

“I will very much be making every recommendation I can to City Council, based on my experience in the community and with the trust, to try to help them see where they can do better, and what plans they can implement in the future to avoid this," Davis said. 

Nicks also was frustrated that the city was stretched thin, and he said officials need to examine whether there are better ways to direct people and resources before this happens again. 

"But the truth is, even if the city was running with perfect efficiency, we still would have had a tremendous need in the community to do what these volunteers are doing," he said. "I'm a big believer in government. But when you have a catastrophe like this, it really comes down to neighbors helping neighbors. We can't roll enough firetrucks, police officers, EMS to solve all the problems immediately when literally a million people have problems."