SAN ANTONIO – Carrol Anderson has spent much of his life in Southeast Texas, where the most feared natural disasters turn out of the Gulf of Mexico during the hot months of the hurricane season. But last week, Anderson, a 75-year-old man who breathes using oxygen tanks, knew another kind of storm was on its way.
In preparation, he ordered a fresh supply of oxygen that, according to his stepdaughter, never arrived. However, there was an extra tank in the pickup outside his one-story brick home in Crosby, Texas, just northeast of Houston.
When Anderson, a veteran of the army who passed by Andy, was found in his truck on Tuesday, his stepdaughter thought he had gone outside to fetch it. His main tank, back in the house, runs on electricity, and the power disappeared the night before when a deadly cold descended over much of Texas.
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While the final score could have been much higher, Anderson was among at least 58 people who died in storm-stricken areas as far as Ohio, victims of carbon monoxide poisoning, car accidents, drownings, house fires and hypothermia.
In the county of Galveston, along the Gulf Coast of Texas, authorities said two residents died from exposure to the cold and one person from possible carbon monoxide poisoning. Four other deaths are still under investigation and may have been linked to the icy weather.
County Judge Mark Henry, the province’s top-elected official, said he would have evacuated some of his most vulnerable residents before the winter storm, if he had known that power outages would plunge the country into darkness for several days. He said the Texas Electric Reliability Council, which manages the state’s power grid, had only warned of the power outage. Instead, most residents were without power for at least 48 hours.
“We would like to order an evacuation if we said on Sunday that the power would go out of the country for four days,” he said, adding that the province was more used to evacuations before hurricanes.
An ERCOT spokesman said Friday that the increase in demand underscores the power grid, a crisis so severe that “local utilities could not turn down the disruptions.”
At its peak this week, about 4 million Texans were without power as the temperature dropped to teens and singles. About 165,000 were left without electricity on Friday, though millions were still without running water or under notices to boil their tap water.
Yet there were signs of relief. In the badly hit Austin, Spencer Cronk, city manager, said Friday that more than 1 million gallons of water will arrive over the next two days. The city plans to set up distribution centers, and Cronk said water will be provided to the city’s most vulnerable citizens, such as the elderly and homeless.
Greg Meszaros, the director of Austin’s water supply, said he expects most residents to recover their water pressure over the weekend. Boiling water advice needs to be lifted somewhere next week, he said.
The dimensions of a public health crisis have become clearer, exacerbated by poverty, desperation and, in some cases, a lack of understanding of cold weather safety. Texas hospitals and health care providers had more than 700 visits related to carbon monoxide poisoning between Monday and Wednesday. Thayer Smith, division chief at the Austin Fire Department, said his city had seen dozens of incidents of toxic exposure by people burning charcoal in their homes.
The weather also hampered the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The White House said Friday that 6 million doses of coronavirus vaccines have been suspended due to snowstorms across the country, creating a backlog that affects every state and rejecting the rate of vaccinations in the next week.
In Texas, hospitals struggled this week with 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 treat dialysis. Large amounts of filtered water, in addition to electricity and heat, are needed to properly care for dialysis patients, and water in the hospital has been shut down, said Cande Flores, the fire chief of Abilene.
Flores said at least four people were killed in Abilene as a result of the state power outage, including a homeless man killed by the cold, a 60-year-old man found dead in his home and ‘ an 86-year-old woman whose daughter found her frozen in her backyard.
Elsewhere in the state, a 69-year-old man was found dead in his home in a rural community south of San Antonio, where he lived alone. He had no electricity, and authorities said his bedroom was 35 degrees when they found him.
In Houston, an Ethiopian immigrant dies in her empty car, which was parked in her garage, where she was sitting while charging her phone. The woman, Etenesh Mersha, was talking to a friend when she started to feel tired.
“She was trying to drink water,” said Negash Desta, a family member of Mersha. “After she told her friend she could no longer speak, there was no answer.”
The friend tried to call Houston police but did not have an address, Desta said. The friend turned to Facebook, where she found Desta. Hours later, he finally received a message about what had happened and alerted the police. They found an entire family poisoned.
‘When they got in, they found that the mother and daughter were just dead and that the son and father were still alive. They all fainted, “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 admitted to hospital. Desta said the man had meanwhile been released and that the boy, Beimnet Shalemu, was still in the intensive care unit.
Near Houston in Conroe, Texas, an 11-year-old boy, Cristian Pineda, was found dead in his bed Monday morning. His family had no power the night before, and the parents, the boy and his siblings gathered in one bedroom, Lieutenant James Kelemen of the Conroe police station said Friday.
Like Anderson and Mersha and her family, Cristian was the focus of a fast-paced GoFundMe page. It requested donations to cover the expenses of his funeral in Honduras, where his family comes from. It has raised more than $ 38,000 since Friday afternoon.
The page shows a photo of a boy in a thin red hoodie, smiling and standing in the snow.
On Tuesday, while Anderson’s wife was raiding their living room after a frozen pipe burst, he walked to the garage to get a generator running, hoping he could help clean up with a Shop-Vac.
His wife would only know later that he had walked to his truck in search of oxygen, his stepdaughter, Brandi Campanile, said. It was 19 degrees. It would appear that his extra oxygen tank was empty.
“He was trying to get oxygen and it was just a losing battle,” Campanile said Friday. ‘Texas is not meant to handle icy temperatures. It does not happen out here. ”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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