Man dies from cold in Williamson County; county employees clear roads

One person has died from the cold in Williamson County, officials said Friday.

A 63-year-old man was taken to a hospital, where he died of hypothermia, said Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell. The man did not live in a city, Gravell said during a news conference on Friday.

The judge declined to provide further details about the man, saying he was trying to respect the privacy of the man’s family.

The Williamson County sheriff’s office has responded to 1,792 calls during the storm, including 203 traffic hazard calls and 138 welfare concern calls, said Sheriff Mike Gleason.

Paramedics have responded to 842 calls during the winter storm. “The number two reason for the calls is falls,” said Mike Knipstein, the director of Williamson County EMS. Knipstein asked people to be careful if they go outside.

He said the county’s mobile outreach team found volunteers to drive people who needed dialysis to treatment centers that were open.

The county’s road crew has put 1,000 tons of aggregate and sand on roads to make them driveable, said Gravell. He said the road crews also cleared the way on roads for Oncor Energy trucks that were driving on Thursday from Dallas to Florence.

The crews used blades on motor grader machines to make the roads driveable into Florence, where the city was without power on Thursday because of problems with a transformer.

Gravell said that on Thursday he also went to Florence, where he saw two high school boys and a college student driving around delivering gas for cars to their neighbors. He also saw a couple, whom he only knew by their first names, Luke and Lucy, giving homemade soup to the students delivering the gas “in the freezing cold,” he said.

The county’s road and bridge crew also delivered diesel to 90 people in a nursing home that only had enough fuel to last one hour for its generator, said Gravell. The facility was using a generator because it had a power outage.

The county’s road workers also helped a stranded ambulance and a stranded fire truck get back on the road by sanding and salting the frozen area, Gravell said. The crews also cleared an area north of Georgetown, where hundreds of 18-wheeler trucks were stuck on the frontage roads of Interstate 35 or on the interstate itself, he said.

Gravell asked Williamson County residents to help each other out on Saturday. “Let’s make tomorrow neighbor helping neighbor day,” he said. “Boil water and share it with your neighbors,” he said.