State must do better for Merrimack Valley

There are singular events that happen in contemporary America that defy our notion of a comfortable reality. For example, the Flint, Mich., water crisis in which 6,00012,000 children were exposed to lead. Or Hurricane Maria, which ravaged Puerto Rico — crippling the island for months, resulting in an estimated 3,000 deaths.

While the situation in the Merrimack Valley after the recent gas explosions is not on that scale, nevertheless, it is jarring to see such tragic fallout in which Americans are living, surviving, in conditions reminiscent of the Great Depression.

The compelling story of Yohanny Cespedes, a Lawrence mom with three small daughters, illustrates just how lives have been turned upsidedown, just 30 miles north of Boston.

As the Herald’s Alexi Cohan reported, Cespedes wakes at 6 a.m. to start boiling water on the hot plate so she can bathe her three young children. That’s if everything goes right. “I was in my house yesterday morning and my daughter was cold. Her hands were so cold that I said to myself, ‘I have to leave, I can’t be here.’ So I called my sister and said, ‘Can you turn the heat on? I’m coming to your house.’ So we went to her house and slept on the floor because we wanted to be together,” Cespedes said.

Cespedes prepares oatmeal and bananas for her daughter Kianny — with water from the hot plate she was given last week. She would usually be making huevos and platanos on the gas stove. Cespedes likes to keep a clean household, and it is harder without hot water. She worries about her girls and her baby. “We need to maintain a really clean environment for them. We worry about cleaning the baby’s bottles . ... They are little and can get sick easily,” she said.

The weather is getting colder in the Merrimack Valley and that doesn’t bode well for Cespedes and her family. National Guardsmen stopped by her house Tuesday and told her they couldn’t give her a space heater for her home because the electrical wiring is too old to support it. It would be a fire hazard. “They said there’s nothing they can do,” she said.

Cespedes’ new normal includes filling a bucket that sits in the shower with water warmed on the hot plate. She bathes her children with it — quickly. The water cools down fast, she said. Her children have been eating packaged foods since the disaster. When the explosions happened and the electricity was cut, Cespedes said she had to throw out about $400 worth of groceries.

Readers with little children already know what a challenge it is to get through the day with everything working ideally. It is hard to imagine the ongoing anxiety Yohanny Cespedes is dealing with. As a parent, she has little time to attend to her own emotional well-being as she devotes herself to creating a sense of normalcy for the children. It must be exhausting.

This is 2018 in Massachusetts, not the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. No one should be living this way. Gov. Charlie Baker must find solutions for people like Cespedes and the estimated 8,000 other households surviving on hot-plate technology.

Columbia Gas should be held to account for this mess and must redouble its efforts in order to undo some of the damage done to the thousands whose lives have been turned upside-down. That includes the many businesses that may never recover.

If space heaters do not work, an alternative must be found, because Massachusetts is better than this. Better than being a place where little children shiver in their freezing homes while the rest of the commonwealth goes on with business as usual. We must help these people now or our legacy for this will be one of shame.