For victims, too much to bear
Freeze was deadly for those already facing challenges
Gilbert Rivera was proud to live on his own. Sixty years old and mentally challenged, he enjoyed listening to his boombox and talking with family on the phone.
When his brother Isaac Ibarra called on the afternoon of Feb. 15, Houston’s coldest day in three decades, Rivera said he had lost power and heat at his apartment near Hobby Airport but was OK. Then his cellphone died, leaving his brother unable to check in that evening, when temperatures dropped into the teens.
The roads were too icy for Ibarra to travel the 25 miles to his brother’s apartment until Tuesday afternoon. When he arrived, he found his brother curled up on the floor of his bedroom, bundled in his warmest clothes. The
medical examiner determined Rivera had died of hypothermia, the clinical term for when someone has frozen to death.
For his family, Rivera’s death is more enraging because it was preventable. Not only did the state power grid fail to ensure Texans would have electricity during a record cold snap, its operator issued no warnings that dayslong blackouts affecting millions were even a possibility.
“These people should have educated us on, ‘This is what you need to have; this is what needs to be done in order to keep you and your loved ones safe,’” said Lawrence Ibarra, Rivera’s nephew. “This is like having a tornado without a tornado siren to give you a heads-up.”
Rivera was one of more than 40 Houston-area residents to die this month because of the subfreezing temperatures and widespread outages that left millions without power across the state. They froze in their homes or while exposed to the elements, succumbed to carbon monoxide or house fires while trying to keep warm, or were killed in wrecks on icy roads.
As investigators complete the grim task of certifying fatalities for which there was no obvious cause, especially unwitnessed deaths in homes, the tally is likely to grow. The Houston Chronicle count includes 51 deaths that authorities attribute to, or suspect were caused by, the storm and cold, and another five they believe may be linked.
Comparable to Harvey
Many others have died across Texas, including six people who were killed in a pileup on an icy Fort Worth interstate highway as the cold weather began.
By comparison to the worst recent natural disaster, more than 75 people across the state — including about 50 who lived in the Houston area — died during Hurricane Harvey’s massive flooding and its aftermath.
A few deaths did not occur during the winter storm that reached the Houston area on the night of Feb. 14 but may have been caused by factors preceding or following it. They include a 52year-old man who is believed to have died in a Houston hospital ER of hypothermia on Feb. 13, when temperatures dropped to near freezing.
And while the deaths occurred across the eightcounty Houston region, many of the victims had a trait in common: vulnerability. Some were disabled. Others were homeless. Most were elderly. Six were children. At least one had mental illness.
Poverty, disability and being elderly without a support system are factors that increase the risk of death in disasters, said Craig Fugate, who served as FEMA director during the Obama administration.
“Even in extreme cold, as long as you’re inside, for most people it’s uncomfortable but not fatal,” Fugate said. “For the vulnerable populations, it is. We’ve seen this with extreme weather events.”
Houston is in a uniquely poor position to get through crises, said disaster expert Angela Blanchard, because leaders for too long have treated the region’s individual vulnerabilities as if they weren’t connected.
“In an era of upheaval,
these things don’t come in distinct packages and you get a reprieve between them, and you can deal with one before the next arrives,” said Blanchard, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute. “And when you have leaders who believe they only have to perform like heroes in their own lane, they miss the interdependencies and the risk of a cascading set of events of the pandemic and the freeze that leaves us further vulnerable heading into hurricane season.”
Trying to stay warm
In this latest calamity, death struck nearly every corner of the Houston region. The Chronicle’s tally covers fatalities in Harris, Fort Bend, Galveston, Montgomery and Brazoria counties. None had yet been reported in Waller, Chambers and Liberty counties.
In Sugar Land, a 75-yearold woman and three of her grandchildren, ages 5 to 11, were killed in a house fire in the early hours of Feb. 16 after they had used their fireplace to keep warm; a couple in Trinity Gardens, according to news reports, also perished in a blaze.
An 11-year-old Conroe boy died of suspected hypothermia in his family’s frigid, powerless mobile home early on Feb. 16, hours after playing in snow for the first time. In Crosby, a 75-yearold Vietnam veteran died the same day after a power loss left his oxygen tank not working, forcing him to head to his truck for a small portable oxygen tank that he kept there.
And in Galveston and Brazoria counties, at least three people were confirmed to have died from exposure, according to the medical examiner for both counties, while five others were suspected of dying due to the weather. Two others were suspected of being killed by carbon monoxide poisoning, but autopsies were pending.
Like Gilbert Rivera, Peter Labbe, a 76-year-old retired city of Houston employee, lived alone, said his son, Brian.
After hours without electricity early last week, Brian Labbe wanted his dad — his “best bud” — to endure the brutal cold with him. But he, too, did not have electricity.
On the morning of Feb. 17, as the region began to emerge from the coldest weather, Labbe’s brother went to to check on their father. No answer.
Brian Labbe, who had a key to the house, decided to swing by himself. He knocked and knocked. No answer.
Labbe found his deceased father in his tool shed.
Authorities ruled the cause hypothermia, as well, and deemed the manner of death an accident.
“I think he was trying to get one of his little heaters,”
Labbe said. “The house was extremely cold.”
The two last spoke the night before about keeping warm. Peter Labbe told his son that he was just trying to bundle up.
“I’m going to really, really miss him,” Brian Labbe said, reminiscing about their fishing trips to Galveston and the barbecue pits that he had started making from scratch since retiring. “He was an awesome dad.”
Silent killer
Immediately upon receiving the message on Facebook, Negash Desta said he suspected his relatives had been poisoned by carbon monoxide.
He recounted what happened. While talking by phone to a friend in Colorado, a woman later identified as Mersha Etenesh Eshetu stopped answering. She had been charging her cellphone in her idling car, which was in the garage of her family’s Sharpstown home, as her husband, Ato Shalemu Bekele, and their two kids enjoyed what appeared to be their first encounter with snow.
When Bekele returned inside, he tried to pull his ill wife from the car. She vomited, Desta said in a brief interview last week.
Bekele asked the kids to grab paper towels, but soon collapsed himself. Then one of the children fell down.
By the time the friend from Colorado tracked down Desta, hours had passed. Desta called authorities. Eshetu and her daughter died. Bekele and his son were taken to a hospital in critical condition. Bekele was discharged last week. His son remained in the hospital, Desta said.
Desta and others started an online fundraiser to help cover funeral arrangements for the family, who moved to the Houston area from Ethiopia about eight years ago.
“They were just really good,” Desta said. “It’s very hard to bear this.”
‘It hurts so bad’
A week after mild weather returned to the Houston area, some families were still just learning the fate of loved ones.
After days of being unable to find Betty Hagan, an older woman with dementia who wandered away from home during the cold snap, her family filed a missing person’s report with Houston police on Monday. The department distributed a bulletin that evening with basic information about her.
A day later, authorities called.
Her body had been found near a church, police said, not too far from the family’s home in southeast Houston.
“She froze to death during the freeze,” her daughter Latricia said by phone, breaking down. “It hurts so bad.”
Growing up, Latricia Hagan recalled that her mother sometimes would panhandle to ensure the family had enough to eat. She’d encourage Latricia and her brother to prioritize their education.
“We were poor, but she made it as if to not have us worry,” the daughter said. “She cared about people.”
Betty Hagan would often say to family, “We are all we got.”
Now that her mother’s gone, Latricia Hagan said,
those words remain in her head and heart.
‘Texas suffered’
As relatives of those who died arranged funerals and launched fundraisers to defray the costs, state officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott, voiced outrage that such a breakdown of the power grid could happen.
Abbott blamed the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, which operates the state’s power grid. Others criticized the state’s Republican leadership for not insisting that power companies undertake costly upgrades such as weatherization to keep millions of people from losing power.
Bill Magness, the grid operator’s CEO, told the Legislature on Thursday that the blackouts the council imposed were necessary to avoid catastrophic damage to the system, though he acknowledged the human toll of the disaster.
“Texas suffered last week,” he said, “in ways they shouldn’t have to suffer.”