After all the fury, Irma was a furtive killer
These were not the perils we envisioned from a monstrous hurricane that had wrecked the Caribbean and then menaced Florida with winds powerful enough to rip dwellings apart and a storm surge that could inundate coastal neighborhoods.
It wasn’t those furious gusts or rising seas that snuffed out the lives of at least 26 Floridians. Irma killed in more furtive ways. Six Floridians died in car crashes attributed to storm conditions.
At least seven, including a seven-year-old Polk County girl, died from carbon monoxide poisoning, overcome by fumes from dangerously situated generators.
Four others, including a 57-year-old Davie man who fell from a ladder while installing hurricane shutters a day ahead of Irma, died in accidents during storm preparation. At least one fatal heart attack was blamed on hurricane stress. Monroe County officials reported eight deaths during the storm but at least six of those were attributed to “natural causes.”
Then came the wrenching news that eight elderly patients had perished at the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills. Not from exposure to the violent weather that ripped through South Florida, but in the miserable, stifling hot aftermath of the hurricane.
I joined the media gaggle who had gathered Wednesday afternoon outside the nursing home, encircled with yellow crime scene tape. It seemed unfathomable that for all our worries about 185 mph winds and a six-foot storm surge, that the single deadliest consequence Irma visited on Florida occurred at 1200 N. 35th Ave.
None of the dozen or so trees around the building had been downed by high winds. The intersection at North 35th Avenue and Garfield was not strewn with the kind of debris that choked streets in harder hit neighborhoods. The structure’s roof tiles were all intact.
Yet this was the place — not Cudjoe Key or Marathon or Naples or Everglades City or Marco Island — where Hurricane Irma did its worst.
The eight frail patients, ranging from 71 to 99, died from respiratory complications brought on by unbearable heat. After Irma knocked out a transformer, the nursing home had no generator to power its air conditioner. The old people could only swelter.
The address made the deaths all the more shocking. The Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills is situated just across Garfield Street from Memorial Regional Hospital, one of the largest hospitals in Florida and just down the block from Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital. But the home might as well have been in the middle of the Everglades.
The storm exposed what appears to be grotesque negligence at the home. City police, along with investigators from various city and county agencies, promised to find out who was responsible.
But the eight deaths also reminded Floridians that they reside in a state that prefers tepid regulation over matters of health and safety. Florida newspapers have regularly reported about harrowing conditions in Florida’s nursing homes and assisted living facilities but industry lobbyists have managed to beat down legislation that would have toughened state oversight.
This was a nursing home that had been allowed to remain in business despite racking up a dismal number of safety violations (despite charging $242 a night for a private room). And surely a tighter regulatory regime might have brought extra scrutiny to a nursing home owner who (with his then partners) had paid $15.4 million settlement in a Medicare fraud civil suit back in 2006.
Of course, in the wake of these eight deaths, the governor and other state officials are promising a thorough investigation. But not that thorough. The investigation will stop with the operation of the nursing home. Gov. Rick Scott’s interest in the tragedy won’t extend to any culpability by his friends (and political contributors) at FPL, whose much celebrated (and rate payer-financed) $3 billion “hardening” of the electrical grid failed to prevent four million of homes and businesses, including the stricken nursing home in Hollywood, from losing service.
Nor is Gov. Scott likely explore whether a warming climate had contributed to the storm’s record intensity. Never mind that scientists have been warning us that Florida, with 1,350 miles of coastline along ever warming, ever rising seas, could be in for some hellish weather events.
Otherwise, Scott might be forced to admit that Irma was only a deadly harbinger of storms to come.
Editor’s note: Fred Grimm is joining the ranks of Sun Sentinel columnists. Grimm has been a journalist since 1968, working for five newspapers, including the Miami Herald, where during his 41 years there, he was a metro reporter, the Herald’s southern bureau chief and ( from 1991 to 2017) a local affairs columnist. He has been the recipient of the National Headliners Award, two Green Eyeshade Awards, the Robert T. Morse Writer’s Award and a number of state journalism awards. Grimm has resided in Fort Lauderdale’s Colee Hammock neighborhood since 1991. Readers may email him at leogrimm@gmail.com.