The cost of freezing temperatures on one Dallas family
Money
Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Nick Parrish. I live in east Dallas and earlier this year, my wife are taller and I experienced definitely the harshest winter I've ever seen in north Texas or anywhere else for that matter. So in the span of about a week, it went from fifties, sixties to zero, and we went from still having power, but pipes frozen to pipes, frozen, and then pipes bursting and having to break [00:00:30] out walls because of that. And then that doesn't include the exterior damage in terms of landscaping that ended up getting destroyed during the freeze, all in all. We only had to spend a few hundred dollars, uh, to kind of get it fixed, but we're lucky in the sense that I already had a lot of the tools and just the knowledge in order to be able to do that. If we had to go the contractor and or insurance route, it definitely would've been in the thousands between labor and parts to get that done.
Speaker 1: If experience is the best teacher, [00:01:00] uh, winding back the clock in the summer of 2019, basically just a street line. Windstorm came through our same area. And depending on where you lived in Dallas, he didn't have power for up to like four or five days. We were on the high end of that range. And our son had just come home from the hospital that week. So that's when I bought our generator. So kind of checkbox one, uh, having power is good fast forward to this storm, making sure that you have food, water, [00:01:30] gas, um, tools to be able to fix anything like in our case, like our, our pipes bursting, being able to fix that right away versus having to wait or go run to a neighbor's house. Um, so definitely thinking more in the same know here in Texas, it's always high heat. Maybe drought conditions, rarely is it winter conditions that you're having to factor in, but this year is a pretty good teacher that even a week worth of severe winter weather can totally cripple our metroplex. And in this case, the [00:02:00] entire state was, was pretty much feeling it.
