The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Warmer temps bring relief as cold-weary South starts cleanup
DALLAS — Warmer temperatures spread across the southern United States on Saturday, bringing some relief to a winter weary region that faces a challenging clean-up and expensive repairs from days of extreme cold and widespread power outages.
In hard-hit Texas, where millions were warned to boil tap water before drinking it, the warm-up was expected to last for several days. The thaw produced burst pipes throughout the region, adding to the list of woes from severe conditions that were blamed for at least 69 deaths.
By Saturday afternoon, the sun had come out in Dallas and temperatures were nearing the 50s. People emerged to walk and jog in residential neighborhoods after days indoors. Many roads had dried out and patches of snow were melting. Snowmen slumped.
Linda Nguyen woke up in a Dallas hotel room Saturday morning with an assurance she hadn’t had in nearly a week: she and her cat had somewhere to sleep with power and water.
Electricity had been restored to her apartment on Wednesday, but when Nguyen arrived home from work the next evening she found a soaked carpet. A pipe had burst in her bedroom.
“It’s essentially unlivable,“said Nguyen, 27, who works in real estate. “Everything is completely ruined.“
Deaths attributed to the weather include a man at an Abilene health care facility where the lack of water pressure made medical treatment impossible. Officials also reported deaths from hypothermia, including homeless people and those inside buildings with no power or heat. Others died in car accidents on icy roads or from suspected carbon monoxide poisoning.
A Tennessee farmer died trying to save two calves from a frozen pond.
President Joe Biden’s office said Saturday he has declared a major disaster in Texas, directing federal agencies to help in the recovery.
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, tweeted Saturday that she helped raise more than $3 million toward relief, and was soliciting help at a Houston food bank, one of 12 Texas organizations she said would benefit from the money.
The storms left more than 300,000 still without power across the country on Saturday, many of them in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.
More than 50,000 Oregon electricity customers were among those without power, more than a week after an ice storm ravaged the electrical grid. Portland General Electric had hoped to have service back to all but 15,000 customers by Friday night but the utility discovered additional damage in previously inaccessible areas.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown ordered the National Guard to go door-to-door in some areas to check on residents’ welfare. At its peak, what was the worst ice storm in 40 years knocked out power to more than 350,000.
In West Virginia, Appalachian Power in West Virginia was working on a list of about 1,500 places that needed repair, as about 44,000 customers in the state remained without electricity after experiencing back-to-back ice storms Feb. 11 and Feb. 15. More than 3,200 workers were attempting to get power back online, their efforts spread across the six most affected counties on Saturday.
In Wayne County, West Virginia, workers had to replace the same pole three times because trees kept falling on it.
Water woes added misery for people across the South who went without heat or electricity for days after the ice and snow storms forced rolling blackouts from Minnesota to Texas.
Robert Tuskey was retrieving tools from the back of his pickup truck Saturday afternoon as he prepared to fix a water line at a friend’s home in Dallas.
“Everything’s been freezing,” Tuskey said. “I even had one in my own house . of course I’m lucky I’m a plumber.”
Tuskey, 49, said his plumbing business has had a stream of calls for help from friends and relations with burst pipes. “I’m fixing to go help out another family member,” he said. “I know she ain’t got no money at all, but they ain’t got no water at all and they’re older.”
In Jackson, Mississippi, most of the city of about 161,000 lacked running water, and officials blamed city water mains that are more than 100 years old and not built for freezing weather.
The city was providing water for flushing toilets and drinking, but residents had to pick it up, leaving the elderly and those living on icy roads vulnerable.
Water pressure problems prompted Memphis International Airport to cancel all incoming and outgoing Friday flights, but the passenger terminal was expected to reopen by midafternoon Saturday.
In many areas, water pressure dropped after lines froze and because people left faucets dripping to prevent pipes from icing, authorities said.
The Saturday thaw after 11 days of freezing temperatures in Oklahoma City left residents with burst water pipes, inoperable wells and furnaces knocked out of operation by brief power blackouts.
Roy Gendreau lives alone, and he likes it that way. The 74-yearold widower is entirely independent, with his children living many states away. If he needs groceries, he drives to the store and goes shopping. When he wants to watch television, he controls the remote. He revels in the quiet.
“I do everything myself,” Gendreau said. “During the summer, I keep active. I have a big garden. I wash my car, I do my own groceries. The only time I bother my kids is if I need something off Amazon.”
When he woke up one morning to discover a large amount of blood in his urine, he didn’t panic. He just called his doctor, who sent him immediately to Dr. Jeffrey Ranta, Regional Medical Director of the Tallwood Urology and Kidney Institute for the Fairfield Region and chief of urology at St. Vincent’s Medical Center.
“I was bleeding really bad,” Gendreau said. “It started early one morning. I couldn’t control it. It was totally unexpected. Turns out, I have bladder cancer that I didn’t know about.”
Dr. Ranta drained Gendreau’s bladder and found a tumor on its wall that needed to be removed.
“I went to the doctor’s office, and he did a scope up my bladder,” Gendreau said. “It looked like the inside of a cantaloupe, and that was the cancer.”
Because the tumor was non-invasive, meaning it didn’t spread to other systems within the body, the procedure to resect it at St. Vincent’s Medical Center could be scheduled in an outpatient clinic the very next week. Gendreau didn’t even have to stay the night.
“We try to get people into the hospital for as short a period of time as possible, which is a big change in how we’ve done things over the past several years,” Dr. Ranta said. “It’s for the patient’s safety and comfort. We want to keep a patient at home, where they are more comfortable and can return quicker to everyday life.”
“I’ve never spent the night in a hospital,” Gendreau said. “All the procedures I’ve had I were in-and-out same day. I want to keep my record going. I wasn’t even born in a hospital.”
After the procedure, they sent Gendreau home with a regimen of immunotherapy to try to use his own body’s defense system to fight the remaining tumor cells.
“I had to go to six sessions at his office where they injected a white clear liquid, and I had to go home and for a half an hour roll around on each side, and then I could go to the bathroom. Afterward, I had to close the toilet, put some Clorox in there and flush it,” he said. “So whatever [that medicine] was, it was pretty potent.”
Dr. Ranta will then follow up with a biopsy to gauge the results of the immunotherapy. If it works, they’ll keep Gendreau on a watch-and-see schedule to make sure the tumors don’t recur. If it does not work, Gendreau has some choices to make.
“It will depend on what he wants to do, if he wants to continue immunotherapy as an outpatient we will,” Dr. Ranta said. “Hartford HealthCare is patient-directed. Whatever the patient needs, whether it’s on an individual or global basis. The system continues to change to make life better and safer for patients.”
Gendreau says he felt safe and cared for under Dr. Ranta’s guidance.
“He’s a real professional. He just wouldn’t let me go until he explained everything. He covered everything,” Gendreau said. “I actually brought my brother with me for the consultation so he could remember the stuff I forgot, and then we relayed it back to my daughter, who is a nurse. [Dr. Ranta] has a real bedside manner. I asked him questions, and he would give me the answers in layman’s terms. I liked the fact that he was in no hurry.”
“What you have to do is understand that the sick person is scared and may not hear everything that is said the first time around,” Dr. Ranta explained. “Sometimes what seem like simple concepts need to be repeated, and you have to listen as well as speak.”
Even while the pandemic continues to rage on, because of Hartford HealthCare’s integrated system, Gendreau was able to get his COVID-19 tests quickly so that they did not disrupt his treatment.
“I can’t emphasize enough how nice these people are,” Gendreau said. “It worked very well.”
Gendreau says he is ready, no matter what comes his way.
As for the future, Dr. Ranta says they’ll do everything they can to keep Gendreau’s life unchanged. All patients want to be independent, he said, but family support systems can be very important. Regardless of treatment plan, St. Vincent’s Medical Center and Hartford HealthCare have a plethora of options to keep the patient as comfortable and independent as possible.
“The living status is critical because it can limit what we can do or if we need to do something with at-home help we coordinate. You can’t treat someone as if they have a family nearby if they don’t,” Dr. Ranta said. “Everyone wants to spend as much time as possible in our homes, as outpatients. Our homes are where we want be.”
This is just one example of Hartford HealthCare St. Vincent’s Medical Center bringing more specialists and providers to the community. Tune into Hartford HealthCare St. Vincent’s Medical Center’s Facebook Live discussion, where you can ask your questions, February 25 at 12 p.m. And for more information, log onto hartfordhealthcare.org/advancedurology or call 203.338.8760.