San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Freeze’s death toll appears far worse
Analysis’ total is double state’s
The deaths of nearly 200 people are linked to February’s cold snap and blackouts, a Hearst Newspapers analysis reveals, making the natural disaster one of the worst in Texas this past century.
The tally, which is nearly double the state’s official count, comes from an investigation of reports from medical examiners, justices of the peace and the Department of State Health Services, as well as lawsuits and news stories.
The state count, which is preliminary, has yet to incorporate some deaths already flagged by medical examiners as storm-related.
The 194 deaths identified by the analysis so far include at least 100 cases of hypothermia that killed people in their homes or while they were exposed to the elements, at least 16 carbon monoxide poisonings of residents who used dangerous methods for heat, and at least 22 Texans who died when medical devices failed without power or who were un
able to seek livesaving care because of the weather.
Sixteen deaths were from other causes, such as fires or vehicle wrecks, while the remaining 40 were attributed by authorities to the storm without listing a specific cause.
“This is almost double the death toll from Hurricane Harvey,” said state Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas. “There was no live footage of flooded homes, or roofs being blown off, or tidal surges, but this was more deadly and devastating than anything we’ve experienced in modern state history.”
The toll is almost certain to grow in coming weeks as death investigators in the state’s most populous counties clear a backlog in cases from the cold snap. The Travis County medical examiner alone is investigating more than 80 between Feb. 13 and Feb. 20.
The deaths come from 57 counties in all regions but are disproportionately centered on the Houston area, which at times during the crisis accounted for nearly half of all power outages. Of the known ages, races and ethnicities of the victims, 74 percent were people of color. Half were at least 65. Six were children.
Those deaths could have been avoided, disaster and medical experts say, if Texas leaders had ensured the state’s energy infrastructure could withstand severe winter weather, had informed the public that sustained blackouts were possible or had a comprehensive plan to protect vulnerable residents during extreme cold events.
“I had a 93-year-old who died in his home. If his electricity had not been turned off in those rolling blackouts, chances are he’d be alive today,” said Dr. Corinne Stern, the Webb County medical examiner. “These deaths were preventable, and they’re senseless. They shouldn’t have happened.”
The week of Valentine’s Day, temperatures plunged below freezing across the state. Energy infrastructure froze and dropped offline, forcing the manager of the state’s power grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, to order widespread blackouts to avoid a catastrophic system failure.
At the peak of the crisis, more than 4 million Texas customers were in the dark. Many had no power or heat for days, unable to travel because of unsafe roads or because they had nowhere else to go.
Days-long blackouts are “unheard of ” in developed countries, said José Aguilar, a U.S.-based utilities expert working to repair Venezuela’s grid after mismanagement and underinvestment led to an electricity crisis two years ago. All grids have flaws, he said, but Texas leaders failed to heed warnings from past outages to make the state’s system more resilient.
“It’s inexcusable, the consequences the poor folks had to suffer,” Aguilar said. “If people in Texas aren’t going to pay attention to this, they’re going to put in Texas another Venezuela.”
Tracking deaths difficult
Determining how many Texans died in the cold is made difficult by the state’s decentralized death certification system. Just 14 counties have medical examiners to investigate untimely deaths; the remainder rely on justices of the peace who receive training but rarely have a formal medical background. Reporters asked the designated death investigators in all 254 counties for all fatalities attributable to the cold snap and blackouts.
Because there is no public state database tracking these deaths, their disclosure depends on the whims of local public servants. Harris County’s medical examiner, for example, provided comprehensive details about the deaths investigators attributed to the cold; its counterpart in Bexar County declined to answer any questions until its probe is complete.
News reports and dozens of wrongful death lawsuits brought against power companies by relatives of Texans who perished help fill in the gaps. What the death tally to date shows is how Texans were caught off guard — in the days before the blackouts, ERCOT issued no warnings that widespread outages could occur — and that most victims were vulnerable in some way.
Betty Dietker, 74, died of suspected hypothermia after the temperature inside her Hunt County home dropped to 32 degrees. Manuel Riojas, 64, who had 23 grandchildren, died at his San Antonio home after his oxygen machine lost power.
Deborah Wright, 63; James Harkness Jr., 60; and Richard Woodard, 42, succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator in Nacogdoches County. Rodrick Draper, 47, froze to death in a vehicle in Houston.
Pramod Bhattarai, 23, a college student from Nepal, died from carbon monoxide poisoning after using a charcoal grill to heat his Houston home. Loan Le, 75; Olivia Nguyen, 11; Edison Nguyen, 8; and Colette Nguyen, 5, died in Sugar Land after a fireplace blaze they had started for heat grew out of control.
As the cold weather immobilized everyone across the state, Gloria Jones assured everyone who checked in on her: She was fine.
The 87-year-old, who lived alone in Hillsboro, roughly 60 miles southwest of Dallas, had remained healthy and social until then, making video calls over the last year to catch up with people during the pandemic, said her son, Derrick Jones.
When Jones called his mother the morning of Feb. 15, there was no answer. One of his sisters beat him to their mother’s home, which had lost power and heat, and found Gloria Jones on the floor next to her bed. After attempts by hospital staff to warm her, she was pronounced dead shortly afterward.
“She was doing just fine,” Derrick Jones said. “She told us all, ‘Don’t worry about me.’”
Two weeks after celebrating his 90th birthday, Harvey Robinson and his wife were restless in their side of a duplex in Galveston on Feb. 15, said their son, Daniel, who lived in the other.
The power had gone out the previous afternoon, and it sounded to Daniel like his parents were running around. He told them to stay put and bundle up.
The next day, Daniel found his mother rambling incoherently and his father slurring his words. The temperature inside their home hovered around freezing. Daniel called an ambulance to take both parents to the hospital.
His mother recovered. His father, a Navy veteran and retired barber, did not.
“For a 90-year-old man,” Daniel said, “he was doing great.”
Deborah Kiel collapsed shortly after her sister arrived to pick her up from her Houston home, which had no power, on Feb. 15.
Paramedics arrived and “tried and tried” to resuscitate Kiel, said her sister Janice Carter, who attempted CPR before they showed up. They took her to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
“She was always, always the person that took care of us,” Carter said. “She was the matriarch.”
Kiel’s goodwill extended beyond being protective of and caring for her three sisters and brother. For more than a quarter-century, she worked as a counselor for people struggling with drug abuse. She loved people and helping them.
She did not have children, Carter said, but saw her sibling’s kids as her own, offering immeasurable support and love.
“There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do,” Carter said. “Just a family caring person.”
The families of Jones, Robinson and Kiel have filed wrongful death suits against utility companies or the state power grid. Medical examiners have not yet attributed their deaths to the storm.
Push for reforms
The Department of State Health Services currently attributes 111 fatalities to the winter storm, though it said it plans to regularly update that figure. The agency said it vets deaths from three sources: A medical certifier submits a form about a particular death or flags a death record as related to a disaster, or state epidemiologists match public reports with death certificates.
DSHS has declined, however, to release details beyond the number of deaths per county, except to say the majority were from hypothermia.
Discrepancies in the number of storm deaths reported by medical examiners and by DSHS for the same counties raise questions about how strict the state’s criteria are.
Fort Bend County reported seven deaths to Hearst Newspapers, including the four Sugar Land house fire fatalities; the state so far has acknowledged three. Webb County reported three deaths, including two migrants who died of hypothermia after crossing the Rio Grande; DSHS has tallied one.
The number of indirect deaths caused by the cold and blackouts may be an even larger number than the final tally the state reports, said Irwin Redlener, a researcher at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness. A key tool is to compare how many Texans died during the week of the blackouts with the historical average for that period compiled by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.
More Texans than projected by the federal agency have died every week since last April because of the pandemic. Deaths jumped an additional 382, or about 8 percent, above that elevated rate during the week of the blackouts.
“Somebody could be dying from consequences of chronic illness that would not have died if there was not a power outage and a storm,” Redlener said.
Jason Enia, a disaster expert at Sam Houston State University, said political will for bold reforms fades quickly after a crisis. A blackout death toll that slowly ticks up does not have the same galvanizing effect on the public psyche as the immediate devastation of a hurricane, he said.
“An event is a potential driver of change going forward as long as people are still remembering it,” Enia said. “In these kinds of events, I think it’s less likely it’s going to stick around for very long.”
Anchia, the state representative from Dallas, shared that sense of urgency. He praised a bill that would strengthen utility regulators and require power plants to weatherize but said the current proposals do not go far enough.
“If we stop here, we will have only engaged in half-measures,” he said. “We really need to continue to maintain a sustained focus on preventing this type of disaster from ever happening again.”