CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Local plumbers were dealing with the first signs of freeze damage Tuesday.
Despite lots of precautions, there were still homeowners who fell victim to Mother Nature and suffered broken water fixtures and lost their water.
One resident had all her plants covered and 99 percent of her pipes wrapped with insulation.
It was that one percent that shut down her water for the day.
"We were lucky they had the parts to fix it because, right now, I have no running water because we turned it off because it was just blowing into the street," said Peggy Bielski. "So I had to turn all the water off. So that's been the hardest part really."
When most people think of backflow preventers, they may think of the big U shaped pipes in front of many buildings around town.
But in this case, the preventer was much smaller and used by a resident for her lawn watering system.
"Due to the freezing conditions, we had a leak here on the backflow device itself," said journeyman plumber Oscar Solis. "It's a 1-inch PVB for the irrigation system. You can see on the shutoff -- there's a shutoff here where it went ahead and cracked because it expanded."
Solis said the cold temperatures were still able to break the pipe despite the backflow preventer having a cover.
But he says for most problems, it's too soon to find the leaks.
"The next few days -- that's really when the damages start to occur," he said. "It's not necessarily when the freeze is coming in. It's afterwards, like two days after the freeze, when we'll start to notice a lot more leaking pipes and such. Once everything starts thawing out."
But Bielski and her husband said you can't prepare enough sometimes.
"We dripped the water all night on every single faucet," she said. "So that was good. But you just have to wrap, wrap your pipes."
Several area plumbers confirmed they're still waiting for a rush of burst pipe calls.