SAN ANTONIO – Carrol Anderson has spent much of his life in southeastern Texas, where the most feared natural disasters come from the Gulf of Mexico during the hot months of the hurricane season. But last week, Anderson, a 75-year-old man who was breathing with the help of oxygen tanks, knew that a different type of storm was coming his way.
To prepare, he asked for a new supply of oxygen that his stepdaughter said never arrived. There was a spare tank, however, in the truck in front of his one-story brick house in Crosby, Texas, northeast of Houston.
Then, when Anderson, an Army veteran who passed by Andy, was found dead in his truck on Tuesday, his stepdaughter realized he had gone out to get him. His main tank, back at home, runs on electricity, and the power went out the night before when a deadly chill descended over much of Texas.
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Although the final count may be much higher, Anderson was among at least 58 people who died in areas affected by the storm extending to Ohio, victims of carbon monoxide poisoning, car accidents, drowning, domestic fires and hypothermia.
In Galveston County, along the Texas Gulf Coast, officials said two residents died from exposure to the cold and one person from possible carbon monoxide poisoning. Four other deaths remained under investigation and were possibly related to the cold climate.
County Judge Mark Henry, the county’s top elected official, said he would have evacuated some of its most vulnerable residents before the winter storm, had he known that power cuts would plunge the county into darkness for a few days. He said the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which runs the state’s grid, warned only of continued blackouts. Instead, most residents have been without power for at least 48 hours.
“We would have been happy to order an evacuation if we were told on Sunday that the power would drop and remain for four days,” he said, noting that the county is more used to ordering evacuations before the hurricanes.
An ERCOT spokeswoman said on Friday that increased demand has stressed the power grid, a crisis so dire that “local utilities have not been able to rotate outages”.
At its peak, some 4 million Texans were left without power this week, while temperatures plunged below single digits. Some 165,000 remained without electricity on Friday, although millions were still without running water or under warnings to boil tap water.
Even so, there were signs of relief. In hard-hit Austin, City Manager Spencer Cronk said on Friday that more than 1 million gallons of water would arrive in the next two days. The city plans to establish distribution centers, and Cronk said the water would be delivered to the city’s most vulnerable citizens, such as the elderly and homeless.
Greg Meszaros, director of the Austin water utility, said he hoped that most residents’ water pressure would be restored over the weekend. Boiling water warnings are due to be suspended next week, he said.
Seeing more clearly were the dimensions of a public health crisis exacerbated by poverty, despair and, in some cases, a lack of understanding of safety in cold climates. Texas hospitals and healthcare providers saw more than 700 visits related to carbon monoxide poisoning between Monday and Wednesday. Thayer Smith, chief of division for the Austin Fire Department, said his city had seen dozens of incidents of toxic exposure from people burning coal in their homes.
The weather also made it difficult to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. The White House said on Friday that 6 million doses of coronavirus vaccines were suspended because of snowstorms across the country, creating an accumulation that affected all states and hampered the pace of vaccination appointments next week. .
In Texas, hospitals spent the week battling burst pipes, power outages and acute water shortages, making it difficult to care for patients.
In Abilene, authorities said a man died at Hendrick Medical Center after failing to receive dialysis treatment there. Large amounts of filtered water, in addition to electricity and heat, are needed to properly care for dialysis patients, and the hospital water has been closed, said Cande Flores, Abilene’s fire chief.
Flores said at least four people died in Abilene as a result of the state power grid failure, including a homeless person who died of exposure to the cold, a 60-year-old man who was found dead in his home and a 86-year-old woman. year old whose daughter found her frozen in her backyard.
Elsewhere in the state, a 69-year-old man was found dead inside his home in a rural community south of San Antonio, where he lived alone. He had no electricity and authorities said his room was 35 degrees when they found him.
In Houston, an Ethiopian immigrant died in her stationary car, which was parked in her garage, where she sat while carrying her phone. The woman, Etenesh Mersha, was talking to a friend when she started to feel tired.
“She tried to drink water,” said Negash Desta, a relative by Mersha’s marriage. “After she told her friend that she could no longer speak, there was no response after that.”
The friend tried to call the police in Houston but had no address, Desta said. The friend turned to Facebook, where she found Desta. Hours later, he ended up receiving a message about the incident and alerted the police. They found an entire family, poisoned.
“When they entered, they found that the mother and daughter were dead and the son and father were alive. Everyone passed out, ”he said, adding that the car was still running. The daughter, Rakeb Shalemu, was 7 years old.
Mersha’s husband and 8-year-old son were hospitalized. From this she said that her husband has already been released and that the boy, Beimnet Shalemu, was still in the intensive critical unit.
Near Houston in Conroe, Texas, an 11-year-old boy, Cristian Pineda, was found dead in his bed on Monday morning. His family had no power the night before, and the parents, the boy and his brothers huddled together in a room, Lt. James Kelemen of the Conroe Police Department said on Friday.
Like Anderson, Mersha and their family, Cristian was the focus of a hurriedly assembled GoFundMe page. He requested donations to pay for his funeral in Honduras, his family’s country of origin. She raised more than $ 38,000 on Friday afternoon.
The page showed a photo of a boy in a thin red hood, smiling and standing in the snow.
On Tuesday, while Anderson’s wife cleaned up the living room after a frozen pipe burst, he walked into the garage to try to start a generator, hoping he could help clean up with a Shop-Vac.
His wife would not know until later that he had walked to his truck for oxygen, said his stepdaughter, Brandi Campanile. It was 19 degrees. His reserve oxygen tank, it seemed, was empty.
“He was trying to get oxygen and it was just a losing battle,” said Campanile on Friday. “Texas was not made to handle freezing temperatures. It is not something that happens here ”.
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
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