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Treaty Oak serves as community hub for flood relief
On July 4, as news of the devastating flood event along the Upper Guadalupe River reached the surrounding communities, people and organizations began gearing up to provide help.
In Dripping Springs, a small group of employees from Treaty Oak Distillery discussed a plan to assist, starting with a text message from Lindsey Pesek, director of sales.
“If I can find a point of contact to intake donations, would you guys be interested in staging a drop point at the distillery for key things like bleach, cleaning supplies, toiletries, water, first aide supplies etc.?” Lindsey messaged. “My heart is breaking for my friends and the community out there.”
The team agreed, and announced on social media that Treaty Oak would be open for donation drop offs starting on Monday, July 7. The plan was to collect supplies, load up their personal vehicles, roll out to Kerrville and drop the stuff off to people. But when they came in on Sunday to start prepping the space, people started arriving early with donations.
“We came to move tables, and I was typing up signs, like this is going to go here, this is going to go here… and then people just started coming in,” said Leah Robarts, catering and sales manager.
It started with one lady who brought a couple of bags of paper towels. They told her to go ahead and leave them on the dock. Within an hour and a half, it was clear that their personal vehicles weren’t going to be enough.
“From 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., the cars never stopped,” said Angie Kabirzadeh, food and beverage director. “There was a line of cars just patiently waiting.”
During the last two hours, when the dock was already full, it started raining.
“People jumped out of their cars and started bringing everything off the dock and getting it inside so it wouldn’t get wet or ruined,” Leah said.
Even the young children were hustling and helping out.
“I think my first time losing it, like full-on cry face, was when this little girl walked up with a box of toys, because she wanted to give them to all the little kids that didn’t have any toys,” Angie said. “That was day one.”
On Monday, which was supposed to be the first day of collection, they had to open up another building on site to hold more donations.
“It just started pouring in on its own naturally from the community. It just evolved from there,” Lindsey said. “It was a very small idea, but it became a huge undertaking.”
Within the first two days, the Knights of Columbus got involved - spearheaded by Jimmy Winkler, who was named the group’s emergency coordinator just two days before the flood.
“We were loading Jimmy up with pallets for search and rescue, because at that point we were still finding people that were able to be rescued,” Angie said. “We were sending out shovels, all these key things that weren’t in everybody’s initial dropoffs.”
Susan and Greg Plummer, the owners of Suds Monkey also got involved, connecting the group with a friend from Wimberley, Vanessa Jones, who wanted to lend her airplanes to the effort. Skip King, Suds Monkey’s general manager, got a neighboring business to donate a U-Haul for transport.
“Skip came over here and loaded up the pallets, took it to San Marcos and then it was broken down and loaded on the plane to go into Kerrville on day two,” Jimmy said.
Jimmy said they wanted to make sure that critical supplies got to the location as fast as possible.
“The shovels were all the way up to the cockpit,” Jimmy said. “The seats were dismantled and stuff was stacked all the way to the ceilings to make as much as we could of the 1600 pound weight limit.”
People from the local churches were on the grounds at the Kerrville Municipal Airport to meet Vanessa, and to load supplies onto trailers to go into the different communities.
“We got a lot of the baby formulas and food, medicines and first aid kits on those first flights into Kerrville,” Jimmy said. “It took 30 minutes to load, a 27-minute flight, 30 minutes to unload, and we were back.”
Shortly after that, a no fly zone was implemented. That, plus the volume of supplies that started coming in, made it more practical to switch to trucking. Walt Graner from the Knights of Columbus loaded up his truck and trailer with 42 pallets of emergency supplies for delivery to affected communities. As donations continued to pour into Treaty Oak, they started making connections with other groups and companies. One of the first was Wimberley Towing.
“We had a rainy day and the forklift got stuck in the mud, and so we went online and said, please, can anybody help us? We cannot do any pallets until our forklift gets out,” Angie said. “So Wimberley Towing shows up, and pulls our forklift out of the mud.”
Then, Wimberley Towing offered to load up and deliver four pallets - the first ones to leave the facility. The next day, they returned and picked up more. Still, the donations kept coming. A guy from Henderson came with a loaded down horse trailer. Burlebo donated raincoats and weather jackets. Austin Speed Shop donated tubs that would hold up better in the rain. David Tindol donated pallets. Rudy Montes from Grunt Style started driving for deliveries every day.
“Rudy would go drop off, and come back. And we’d load up the trailer and he’d leave it and come back the next day and do it again. He did a lot,” Kelsey Morris, Treaty Oak administrative assistant, said.
Angie said the drivers never asked for a single thing.
“They’re using their own gas. They’re using their own time, they’re using their trailers and equipment,” Angie said. “It was really beautiful.”
Meanwhile, Eric Thomas, head distiller at Treaty Oak, stayed busy on the forklift.
“He literally ran a forklift for ten days straight,” Angie. “He palletized everything for us, wrapped it, sent it on all the trucks. We ran him ragged like a dog.”
Another big contributor throughout the process was RogueAmerican, which is local to Hudson Bend and run by CeCe Rodgers.
“Every single day she had a trailer full from the communities in the Lakeway and the Hudson Bend / Apache Shores areas, which was amazing,” Angie said.
And every day, Beto Nava, who owns Nava’s Construction, went to pick up those loads and bring them back to Treaty Oak. He would drop off the donations, then load up with pallets and drive them out to the affected communities. By that time, news of flooding in other areas had spread, and the team decided they needed to branch out in their efforts.
“Marble Falls communities lost everything. They had no power, no sewage, no cell phone towers to even find a local spot to go pick up supplies,” Angie said. “And then from there, it was the Sandy Creek side in Leander. I’m seeing these people’s homes in Sandy Creek just be completely washed away.”
Behind the scenes, the Treaty Oak marketing team was responding to thousands of messages. Every single day they would post on their social media feeds with updated lists of requests.
“As we progressed in receiving donations, the donations started to change to just what was on our lists, which was lovely,” Angie said. “We’re like, we need shovels. Next thing you know, somebody comes and drops off 50 shovels.”
When they asked for chainsaws, Maylee Thomas-Fuller from the Love Life Foundation and the Sanctuary Music and Events Center pulled up.
“She drove down here with a truckload of supplies from McKinney, Texas and a thousand dollars in Home Depot gift cards. Then they came down a second time as well with a load of stuff for Jimmy.”
That included more chainsaws, cots and tents. Jimmy and the Knights of Columbus volunteers were providing updated lists of needs directly from the communities.
“He was letting us know, less of this, more of this, and people were responding,” Angie said.
Then the Amazon packages started rolling in.
“People were shipping from all over the country. People that drink our bourbon were sending us bug spray,” Angie said. “They were sending us N95 masks, everything that we asked for.”
Seanne Krogman, Treaty Oak’s operations assistant, would get those supplies packed and ready to go.
“Seanne’s organizing these pallets out there,” Angie said. “We were building five pallets at a time. Each pallet had a sticky on it that had the location where it was going.”
There were also loads of volunteers.
“The phone started ringing, nonstop. People wanting to come help, people wanting to donate, people wanting to just come pick stuff up,” Kelsey said. “We had posts on social media asking for volunteers. And people were just showing up.”
A lot of volunteers came back for multiple days, including Sharon Burke, owner of Poodie’s Hilltop Roadhouse, and her manager, Sherry Pye. They brought seven chainsaws, oil, files and everything, and spent a week volunteering with donations. The next week, Sherry went out to cook with Angie.
“Sharon was running the bar and they were donating their tips and their proceeds from the bar,” Angie said.
A family from Kansas, who were in Texas for an FFA event, also reached out.
“He called and said I’m coming with an empty trailer, what do you guys need?” Kelsey said. “No one had donated chainsaw gas, so that was the only thing I told him and he showed up and donated it.”
One day, the Lake Travis football team volunteered.
“The football team showed up one day to help us and just boxed, packed, organized and moved everything everywhere we needed it to go, which was amazing,” Angie said.
Treaty Oak also received donations from former campers and camp counselors from the Kerrville area, including a group from Heart O’ the Hills who gave $1200 in Home Depot gift cards, plus chainsaws and lights. And the Puryear family got sponsorship from ReMax and purchased supplies to donate.
“They went and bought like $4,300 worth of what was on our list, filled up an entire truck and a trailer full and brought it,” Lindsey.
Yet another day, a group of 20 from Whole Foods came to help.
“By the time the Whole Foods crew left, we were so much more organized,” Angie said. “And every single day we got better. We were in a rhythm and a swing, everybody kind of had their jobs and they had their things that they were working on and we all just kind of worked together.”
In total, the Treaty Oak team sent out around 200 pallets of donations to affected areas, including Kerrville, Center Point, Ingram, Comfort, Hunt, San Angelo, San Saba, Burnett, Marble Falls, Johnson City, Llano, Leander and Lago Vista, even a few small loads to Seguin, Georgetown and New Braunfels.
After the first week, the group started switching gears. Seanne and Lindsey continued working with the donations, and Angie and Leah retreated to the kitchen to start cooking meals for people.
“I connected with Amanda Webb, who’s our representative from Benny Keith. Next thing you know, we have a truckload of stuff,” Angie said. “They had donated over 100 cases of food, packaging supplies, packaged silverware, the bags to put the meals in, everything.”
Miller’s Smokehouse out in Llano donated 30 cases of sausage. Mr. Greens Produce donated onions, garlic and other fresh vegetables. They also received rice, beans, chicken and beef and pork.
“Hatfield donated four cases of pork butts that we smoked out on the smoker, which is 200 pounds. We’re smoking pork butt in the pouring rain,” Angie said. “Whoever’s out there, they’re just throwing a log in to keep that temperature and we’re all just trucking.”
Angie decided to focus her cooking efforts on the community of Sandy Creek.
“We cooked up one day with just a tent and a couple of coolers, and we cooked on the side of the road right off of Big Sandy because the bridge was broken down,” Angie said. “They were running these meals by foot across in the bags to these folks that didn’t have any food.”
Angie was providing meals not just to residents, but also to the people in the area who were helping with recovery efforts.
“They’re all huddled under our tents because there’s no shelter from the sun. They’re sitting there on the ground, on coolers, Indian-style on the back of our truck beds,” Angie said. “Everybody’s been working together sideby- side, meeting each other from all over the place, and now we’re sharing a meal together.”
Angie and her team started out making sausage wraps, and then switched to making more complex dishes, like Cajun pasta or green chili chicken enchiladas and Mexican rice.
“These people just lost their homes. They lost all their belongings,” Angie said. “The last thing I’m gonna go out there and offer them is a peanut butter sandwich.”
Every single day, they also went out with some form of dessert, from homemade cookies to an ambrosia salad. Over four days in Sandy Creek, they served 2,000 meals. Another day, they sent a couple hundred meals to Marble Falls for workers.
“It was big food, big love, big hearts out there, you know,” Angie said.
While there were a lot of uplifting stories about people who were helping, there were also less savory happenings. Some people whose homes had flooded didn’t want to leave because of looting.
“It was disgusting,” Angie said. “People were just going on their land, picking through their belongings and taking what they wanted. Stealing generators off the backs of people’s porches that have nothing.”
Even big equipment wasn’t exempt. Thieves stole a forklift, an excavator, a skid steer.
“People couldn’t leave their equipment out there, knowing they were done at 8 o’clock at night, coming back at 5 in the morning,” Angie said. “Their stuff would be gone in the middle of the night.”
Treaty Oak had generators stolen from their setup in Sandy Creek, where they were preparing meals.
“It’s the unfortunate side of the natural disaster,” Lindsey said.
While recovery is ongoing in all of the communities, efforts are now moving out of crisis mode.
“They’ve already made that transition to clearing these houses that are liveable,” Jimmy said. “People are starting to go back now, and shifting gears to get sheetrock, insulation torn out. Construction is going to be the second phase.”
Once people are home, they will need furniture, mattresses and other home goods. Jimmy said the Knights of Columbus will continue to assist in whatever ways they can.
“Knights of Columbus is boots on the ground every day. A lot of people don’t know that, but we run on the pulse of listening to what’s needed out there from whomever,” Jimmy said. “We put people all up and down the river. We know their backgrounds and their specialties, whether they’re an electrician, plumber, framer.”
He said there are a lot of people like that, who are ready to do whatever it takes, from helping families to continuing to clean up the riverbanks.
“I mean, it’s like 40 miles of debris,” Jimmy said. “The frames of these mobile homes were 40 feet up in the trees, wrapped, looked like they were tin cans,” Jimmy said. “Guardrails were peeled off, they looked like banana peels, just shreds.”
Vehicles were buried under the shifting rocks and sand, or demolished by the power of the water and the materials it carried with it.
“They looked like somebody just shot them full of holes,” Jimmy said. “It just didn’t look like a car anymore. It was just ruin.”
Treaty Oak said it is shifting gears as well, and looking to keep supporting families as they recover.
“Now that their properties are drying out and they have structures, they need furniture, they need drywall, they need all those things that we can’t just hand them,” Lindsey said.
They’ve started a Hill Country Strong program, which is matching donations through bottle purchases and other efforts.
“That’s kind of our goal, is to get people what they need long after, because here’s the deal. Three months from now, these people are still gonna need help,” Angie said. “This is not gonna be an easy rebuild at all.”
Jimmy said that most efforts to date have only been enough to help people through the day.
“It’s not even beginning to do the patch up of what’s been taken away,” Jimmy said.
Angie said she was tremendously proud of the people in Dripping Springs and the surrounding communities for everything they have done and given so far.
“This is not an inexpensive movement,” Angie said. “To see how much they give back, knowing that this is not a very fruitful time for a lot of people, it was really beautiful. And I was very proud to be a part of it.”
