SOUTH FATHER ISLAND, Texas (AP) – Residents, some of whom have no heat or basic services at home due to the unusually cold weather, they have been rescuing stunned sea turtles from the cold and taking them to a convention center in a tourist town in South Texas.
“Every 15 minutes or so there’s another truck or SUV starting,” Ed Caum, executive director of the South Padre Island Convention and Visitors Bureau, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
He said sometimes people carry one or two sea turtles, sometimes more. “Yesterday we were selling full trailers that had 80, 100, 50 of them,” he said.
The South Padre Island Convention Center began launching on Monday when its neighbor, Sea Turtle Inc., was no longer able to control the number of sea turtles left and its operation mainly outdoors had lost energy. . He said the convention center itself had no electricity or water until Wednesday morning.
He says they have “collected” more than 3,500 sea turtles so far. He said he hesitates to use the word rescued because “we know we will lose.”
Caum said it with another cold forehead approaching, they do not know when the sea turtles will be able to return to the water.
Temperatures in the area on Wednesday afternoon were in the 1940s. He said it may be Saturday, when temperatures are expected to reach lows of 60 (above 15 degrees Celsius), before turtles can be released from new to golf.
He said that with the power returned, they have managed to get the temperature of the convention center to reach 60 degrees.
“We are trying to do our best to save as many turtles as possible,” he said.