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Retired Cedarville plumber helps Texans after thawed water pipes burst

CEDARVILLE — A series of winter storms that hit the Miami Valley in February also affected people living in Texas leaving them with busted water pipes that froze and now leaving them with no water.

News Center 7 spoke with a Cedarville couple who made the trek to Texas to help residents.

Plumber Paul Mitchell said, “It was a matter of health and sanitation, get water on and help these dear people out.”

Mitchell, a plumber for 40 years, retired from Cedarville University, saw what was happening in Texas and felt the need to help.

“The issues of hygiene and sustaining life, it’s a day-to-day thing on how they get sanitary facilities and how they get bottled water into their homes,” Mitchell said.

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With hundreds of thousands of Texans in this situation, Texas plumbers were overwhelmed.

Mitchell said, “This is an internal disaster in the homes where the water lines are broken, and the outside of the house looks perfectly nice. So, you drive up to these neighborhoods and you can’t tell who has water and who does not have water.” He went on to say, “They’re telling people three to five months before they can get to them to turn their water back on”

Mitchell worked with a group called Water Mission. He, his son and his wife, Diane, made the 1,200-mile trek to Austin. In the first week, Mitchell and the Water Mission Team restored water to 120 homes, including multiple apartment units.

Many of those residents left their homes when the power went out to find heat and returned to a mess.

“By the time they got back, the power had come on, the heat had come on, ice had thawed, their ceilings had come down, water was pouring out of their ceilings and that’s what they found and that’s what they walked into,” Mitchell said.

For two weeks, they worked all day and all night to restore water to homes that had been without it for almost an entire month.

Mitchell said, “Some repairs were easy. You’d go in find a few breaks, fix it and everything’s done. Others were fix this, turn the water on, find another issue, turn the water off, another issue and another issue.”

Mitchell and his wife are now back in Cedarville. He said, “In the back of your conscience you almost have a guilt feeling that there are still people. I’m home enjoying a nice hot shower, and there are many that just cannot do that.”

Other Water Mission volunteers are taking turns to restore water to as many homes as possible in Texas until the end of April.

“Everyone we met was so appreciative of the help and I just want everyone to know their water is back,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell said the city of Austin has been so thankful for the additional help. It paid for hotel rooms for the plumbers for the rest of the month.

Kayla Courvell

Kayla Courvell

I was born and raised in a small town just north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and decided as a child I was going to be a news reporter.

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