With piles of blankets and socks on hands, nursing homes battle freeze
The power shut off at 8:50 a.m. Tuesday at Bayou Pines Care Center in La Marque, plunging the nursing home and its residents into yet another disaster.
Already, Texas nursing homes had suffered immensely from the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed thousands of residents and left more struggling with isolation as visitors were prohibited in order to protect the vulnerable population.
Bayou Pines administrator Erika Parrish saw this storm coming. She and her staff jumped into action when they lost electricity, piling blankets on residents and using socks as makeshift mittens as outdoor temperatures plummeted. Emergency lights switched on, and staff plugged heaters into hallways.
When kitchen employees couldn’t get there, Parrish’s three sons helped make breakfast. The refrigerator and freezer kept running. Other staff slept at the facility. Even some elderly community members who needed power to operate their oxygen machines took refuge there.
“I’m just exhausted,” Parrish said Thursday, when their power had returned but the cold temperatures lingered. An air mattress remained inflated in her office, where she intended to sleep until the weekend in case power shut off again.
The subfreezing temperatures crippled the region’s pow
er supply, plunging millions into darkness and becoming the presumed cause for at least two dozen deaths in the Houston region.
Nearly half of Texas nursing homes as of Thursday reported weather-related emergencies to the state, including power loss or building damage. The tallies showed 23 of roughly 1,220 nursing homes relocated or evacuated residents. Forty-one of some 2,000 assisted living facilities did, too, and 369 more reported weather-related emergencies.
Two assisted living residents died during the event, but it wasn’t yet clear if the causes of their deaths were related to the impacts of the weather, Texas Health and Human Services spokesperson Christine Mann wrote in an email Friday.
Texas requires facilities to have emergency plans in place. Nursing homes in particular must have generators for life support systems and backup power for some lighting, fire detection and alarm systems.
Still, things can go wrong, and staff had already been through a lot. At one nursing home in West Texas, Focused Care at Fort Stockton, the generator blew a fuse. A hospital gave new fuses, which didn’t work, so they got donated blankets, gloves and hats and finally a new generator that evening.
Nearly all Retirement Center Management facilities in Texas used backup power too, said David Keaton, the company’s president. Workers filled carts at grocery stores because deliveries were disrupted. The company’s marketing director lugged water to flush toilets. Keaton borrowed his neighbor’s van to move mattresses for residents with waterdamaged rooms.
In a Facebook group formed to fight visitation rule changes during the pandemic, Texas Caregivers for Compromise, people shared varied responses to how facilities fared: One wrote that she brought her father home from a facility after his room’s temperature dropped into the 50s. Others expressed difficulty reaching loved ones by phone.
The freeze was the biggest event that Patty Ducayet could remember nursing homes and assisted living facilities facing in her 15 years as the state’s longterm care ombudsman.
Ducayet, in her role, advocates on behalf of long-term care residents. Evacuations done on potentially icy roads worried her. And not all facilities had generators strong enough to power heating systems for their buildings.
“For now, I think things are going alright,” Ducayet said Wednesday. “It’s just the question becomes: How long do these barriers exist?”
Kevin Warren, president and CEO of the Texas Health Care Association, which advocates on behalf of long-term care facilities, noted that staff were managing through high levels of stress to help residents.
The coronavirus spread like wildlife through some facilities, leaving staff and residents fearful. They were prioritized for vaccinations, which provided some protection now when some were grouped in warmed common rooms.
Warren wanted to ensure they were also prioritized for power to return.
At Bayou Pines Thursday, staff were still conducting COVID
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The long-term ombudsman can be reached at 1-800-252-2412 or ltc.ombudsman@hhs.texas.gov.
screenings for anyone who entered and enforcing mask wearing.
Lillian McNeill, wearing a blue mask, explained that she felt well taken care of during the power outage. A cross hung from her wall. What they’d been through this week paled in comparison to the pandemic, she said.
“Compared to what has happened this past year, it was brief,” McNeill, 86, said.
Across the hall, 81-year-old Nina Ponfick agreed they did OK overall. She’d worn her sweater. She made do without the TV programs she liked about Alaska.
Staff members now pushed carts down the hallway, passing out hot chocolate like they had even with the power out. Ethyl Schmidt took a cup of Swiss Miss.
Workers in the partial darkness helped residents get snuggled, Schmidt said. But they prayed for the power’s return, which finally happened more than 24 hours later.
“I wasn’t worried about anything,” said Schmidt, 76, now wearing a pink T-shirt. “My kids were more worried about me.”
That didn’t mean they weren’t relieved when the power came back. As Parrish, the administrator, recalled, her first thought was: “Laundry!”