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| Photo by APTS student Aiden Diaz |
Following a week of winter weather disruptions in and beyond Texas, I want to update you on how things fare here in Austin and on campus.
The weather event across more than a week was the worst snow and ice event in Austin in fifty years, and the third most destructive winter snow event here in the history of weather record-keeping. During this extended emergency, many of us recoiled at the television coverage of massive
automobile pile-ups, some with fatalities, in such places as Fort Worth and Dallas. We know as well of the misery which the homeless and other vulnerable persons among us have been suffering in these days, and we know that a number of them have died. We shook our heads in disbelief at the specter of firefighters in Abilene having no water with which to douse a house fire, and thus rendered helpless to do anything other than watch the house burn to the ground. It will be a while before Texas officials sort out the larger energy breakdowns that resulted in tepid responses to this weather crisis; but, meanwhile, and mercifully, Texans and others impacted by this storm are slowly but surely digging out of this.
Against this larger backdrop, I am grateful to share with you that Austin Seminary—its campus, students, staff and faculty—weathered the storm relatively well. In a number of homes of faculty, staff, and students, power went off at the beginning of the week and some of them moved in with other staff families. Others came to the Maclay suite in McCoy House, or to guest rooms in the McCord Building. A number of the duplexes were beset with frozen pipes. The covered garage and portions of the first floor of Anderson House flooded because of burst pipes, and a flood extractor company came in to mitigate the damage. Flooding occurred in much of the first floor of the Trull Building, and some four hundred gallons of water were also extracted quickly. Trees and large limbs fell across the twelve acres of the campus, and much of the campus went without running water for several days.
Yet I was reminded throughout this week of how living in a residential community is such a blessing, as instinctively so many stepped up and demonstrated the beauty of residential life and formation. Students reached out and helped classmates cope with food and water shortages, shoveling needs, childcare (one student taught a child in the campus community to snowboard!), and various other expressions of a fundamentally pastoral presence. I have profound gratitude for so many of the Seminary’s staff who left whatever warmth was in their own homes to venture out in the weather to come to the campus to address its needs. I want to express particular gratitude to John Everett and all of our amazing maintenance staff who are accustomed to doing the impossible on a regular basis. They are our heroes! And at the end of the week, two staff members whipped up a beef stew for students—a kind of Seder, celebrating a kind of liberation.
I also want to thank so many of you who checked in over this week and who kept Austin Seminary in your prayers. Make room in your prayers for those who are still struggling and are emotionally exhausted. Give thanks for the thousands of helpers—public servants, plumbers, tree\ removal specialists, grocery store staff—and pray for their safety and strength as they continue to be agents of recovery. Remember that we’re all in this together as children of God, and that at our core we are thus knit, inevitably, within a web of kindness and connection.
Ted Wardlaw
President of Austin Seminary
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