Eight die at Florida nursing home
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — Eight patients at a sweltering nursing home died after Hurricane Irma knocked out the air conditioning, raising fears Wednesday about the safety of Florida’s 4 million senior citizens amid power outages that could go on for days.
Hollywood Police Chief Tom Sanchez said investigators believe the deaths at the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills were heat-related, and added: “The building has been sealed off and we are conducting a criminal investigation.”
Gov. Rick Scott called on Florida emergency workers to immediately check on nursing homes and assisted living facilities to make sure patients are safe, and he ordered an investigation into the deaths.
“This situation is unfathomable,” he said.
The home said in a statement the hurricane had knocked out a transformer that powered the AC.
The five women and three men ranged in age from their 70s to 99.
Exactly how the deaths happened
was under investigation, with Sanchez saying authorities have not ruled anything out, including carbon monoxide poisoning from generators.
He also said investigators will look into how many windows were open.
Across the street from the nursing home sat a fully air-conditioned hospital, Memorial Regional.
“It’s a sad state of affairs,” the police chief said. “We all have elderly people in facilities, and we all know we depend on those people in those facilities to care for a vulnerable elderly population.”
The deaths came as people trying to put their lives back together in hurricane-stricken Florida and beyond confronted a multitude of new hazards in the storm’s aftermath, including tree-clearing accidents and lethal generator fumes.
Not counting the nursing home deaths, at least 17 people in Florida have died under Irma-related circumstances, and six more in South Carolina and Georgia, many of them well after the storm had passed. The death toll across the Caribbean stood at 38.
At least six people died of apparent carbon monoxide poisoning from generators in Florida. A Tampa man died after the chain saw he was using to remove trees recoiled and cut his carotid artery.
In Hollywood, after responding to three earlymorning calls about patients in distress, firefighters went through the facility and found three people dead and evacuated more than 150 patients to hospitals, many on stretchers or in wheelchairs, authorities said. By the afternoon, five more had died.
Patients were treated for dehydration, breathing difficulties and other heat-related ills, authorities said.
Nursing homes in Florida are required by state and federal law to file an emergency plan that includes evacuation plans for residents. County officials released documents showing the Hollywood facility was in compliance with that regulation and that it held a hurricane drill with its staff in October.
Calls to the owner and other officials at the Hollywood home were not immediately returned, but the facility’s administrator, Jorge Caballo, said in a statement it was “cooperating fully with relevant authorities to investigate the circumstances that led to this unfortunate and tragic outcome.”
Through a representative, Carballo told the SunSentinel newspaper that the home has a backup generator but that it does not power the air conditioning.
The nursing home was bought at a bankruptcy auction two years ago after its previous owner went to prison for Medicare fraud, according to news reports at the time of the sale.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which regulates nursing homes, gives the Hollywood center a below-average rating, two stars on its five-star scale. But the most recent state inspection reports showed no deficiencies in the area of emergency plans.
Broward County Medical Examiner Dr. Craig Mallak said after receiving some of the bodies for autopsies that the victims had been in poor health, and “it’s going to be tough to tell how much was the heat and how much of it was they were sick already.”
Florida, long one of America’s top retirement destinations, has the highest proportion of people 65 and older of any state — one if five of its 20 million residents. As of 2016, Florida had about 680 nursing homes.
As of Tuesday, the number of people without electricity in the steamy late-summer heat had dropped to 6.8 million — about a third of Florida’s population. Utility officials warned it could take
10 days or more for power to be fully restored. The number of people remaining in shelters fell to under 13,000.
Elsewhere around the state, a Coral Gables apartment building was evacuated after authorities determined a lack of power made it unsafe for elderly tenants.
And at the huge, 15,000-resident Century Village retirement community in Pembroke Pines, more than half the residential buildings had no power Wednesday afternoon. Rescue crews began going door to door in the 94-degree heat to check on people and hand out water, ice and meals.
“These people are basically prisoners in their own homes,” said Pembroke Pines City Manager Charlie Dodge. “That’s why we are camped out there and doing whatever we can to assist them in this process. And we’re not leaving.”
Florida Sen. Bill Nelson called the six deaths in Hollywood “an inexcusable tragedy” and called on authorities to get to the bottom of it.
“We need to make sure we’re doing everything we can to keep our seniors safe during this difficult time,” he said.
In the battered Florida Keys, meanwhile, county officials pushed back against a preliminary estimate from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that 25 percent of all homes in the Keys were destroyed and nearly all the rest were heavily damaged.
“Things look real damaged from the air, but when you clear the trees and all the debris, it’s not much damage to the houses,” said Monroe County Commissioner Heather Carruthers.
The Keys felt Irma’s full fury when the hurricane roared in on Sunday with 130 mph winds. But the extent of the damage has been an unanswered question for days because some places have been unreachable.
President Donald Trump plans to visit Naples, on Florida’s hard-hit southwestern coast, today.