What year was the last big fish kill in the G.I. area? My father remebers being on the Island for meetings and trhey were using front-end loaders to remove the dead fish from the beach, but can't remeber the year.

How did it effect the fishing?

Freeze or red tide?

If they were on the beachfront sounds like red tide. Freeze usually does not harm to many surf fish.

I will have to ask but I would say late January or early Feb. That is when the big AG meetings happen in the TX/OK market. As for Red Tide or freeze I know he said it was cold as a well diggers B%^t in Alaska so being from the Texas Phandale area that was pretty cold.

Late Dec '83 brought an Arctic blast that traveled all the way down to Mexico; killing or severely damaging a large percentage of the citrus trees in the RGV. The Lower Laguna Madre had a significant fish kill during that event; so the GI area may have experienced the same.

There was another Arctic front that blew through in '89 (I think). And, a severe ice storm hit the upper Gulf Coast in early Feb'94 (around the 7th or 8th, with lots of tree limbs falling to the ground).

Weather impacts my business A LOT - so I tend to remember such events.

By the way, the system that blew through today may likely produce some severe fish-kills in area ponds and lakes - particularly those with depths exceeding 8' to 10'.
Most folks refer to the cause as a "lake turn-over", but it is technically called a "thermal inversion" of the water-column. It most commonly occurs in deeper ponds and lakes that have formed a thermocline within the water-column during the warm summer months; where warm (less-dense) "oxygenated" water lies above colder, higher density and "oxygen-void" water. If you've ever been swimming in a pond or lake, and dive down to a level where the water is dramatically colder, it means you passed through a thermocline (an invisible barrier between the warm and cold water).
When a weather system rapidly cools the surface-water, the surface-water's density may increase to the point that it mixes with and/or swaps places with the oxygen-void water below. Either way, the resulting level of dissolved oxygen within the water-column is incapable of supporting fish - and they die.
So much for today's environmental science lesson.....