SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas (AP) – Residents, some of whom are unheated or basic amenities in your own homes due to the exceptionally cold weather, we rescued sea turtles stunned by the cold and took them to a convention center at a resort in south Texas.
“Every 15 minutes or less, another truck or SUV stops,” Ed Caum, executive director of the South Padre Island Convention and Visitors Bureau, told the Associated Press on Wednesday.
He said that sometimes people bring one or two sea turtles, sometimes more. “Yesterday we had full trailers arriving with 80, 100, 50,” he said.
The South Padre Island Convention Center started operating on Monday, when its neighbor, Sea Turtle Inc., was no longer able to cope with the number of sea turtles that fell, and its operation mainly in the open air had lost power. He said the convention center itself had no power or water until Wednesday morning.
He says he has “collected” more than 3,500 sea turtles so far. He said he hesitates to use the word rescued because “we know we are going to lose some”.
Caum said that with another cold front approaching, they do not know when they will be able to return sea turtles to the water.
Temperatures in the area on Wednesday afternoon were in the mid-40s. He said it could be Saturday – when temperatures are expected to reach 60 degrees (above 15 degrees Celsius) – before the turtles can be released back into the Gulf.
He said that, with the energy returned, they managed to reduce the temperature of the convention center to 60 degrees.
“We are trying to do the best we can to save as many turtles as possible,” he said.