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Electricity outages caused by Hurricane Beryl in Houston and southeast Texas forced health care providers there into a sharp pivot on Wednesday as they were forced to hold onto discharged patients longer instead of having them return to powerless homes baking in the summer heat.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick addressed the scramble in a news conference, pointing to how Houston officials transformed NRG Arena, one of the event spaces used by the city’s annual rodeo and livestock show, into a field hospital for 250 discharged patients to free up space in local hospitals. He said this is necessary because several area hospitals are having trouble accommodating new patients.
Some patients have seen their discharges delayed because medications must be kept in a cool place.
“In fact, we had a police officer who was shot in the leg, and when the mayor went down to see him the next day, he still didn’t have a room,” said Patrick, who is serving as acting governor this week while Gov. Greg Abbott is in Taiwan on a trade trip.
Also on Wednesday, Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd said the hospital backup has also caused issues for 911 services as regional ambulances cannot drop their patients off until a room becomes available.
“The City of Houston told us they had an ambulance shortage because all of their ambulances were in the emergency department waiting to offload patients,” Kidd said. “Some had been sitting there for three-plus hours.”
TDEM sent 25 additional ambulances to Houston this week and worked with local emergency services and hospitals to address the backlog in 911 calls.
Kidd said hospitals, physicians, and patients will decide who goes to NRG Arena. Any of the regional hospitals can send a patient to the arena.
According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, at least 17 Texas hospitals are still on generator power following Beryl’s landfall on Monday. The agency did not release the location or the names of those hospitals.
Carrie Williams, spokesperson for the Texas Hospital Association, said the “vast majority" of hospitals in southeast Texas are dealing with some form of post-Beryl challenge like water or wind damage, power or connectivity outages, staff shortages or transportation issues.
“Our biggest concern is for the subset of those hospitals that are running on emergency generators or have no connectivity,” she said. “There are roughly 20% of hospitals in the southeast Texas area using emergency generators for power and others are having connectivity issues.”
Those connectivity problems make it hard for hospital staff to access medical records or order tests.
“We know these hospitals are being prioritized for restoration of services. We are grateful for that, and restoration cannot come soon enough,” she said.
The hospital association put out a list of recommendations for patients in need of electricity for oxygen machines or dialysis, advising them to first seek out cooling centers before going to an emergency room.
In Livingston, residents search out cooling stations
In Livingston, about 70 miles northeast of Houston, the stress of where to go to get relief from the heat, especially for those with compromising health issues, Marissa Suski, 36, pushed her 56-year-old husband, Brian, to go to the Polk County Commerce Center, where a cooling station was set up on Wednesday morning.
Her concerns over his heart condition grew in the aftermath of Beryl’s march through Texas. Only 35% of his heart works after a heart attack in November left him hospitalized for days.
The couple watched their elderly neighbors, one of whom also struggles with her heart, wait hours to receive medical support on Tuesday and decided they didn’t want to risk it. They began searching for a cooling station and learned about the commerce center from a few county employees outside of the Emergency Management office in town.
“I’m sitting here trying to figure out how Onalaska got power, and we don’t,” Marissa Suski said, referring to the smaller town of 3,000 people northwest of Livingston. “You would think with us having the only hospital for quite a while that they would try to get power to us first. Because right now, they’re only working off of generators.”
As of Wednesday, St. Luke’s Health-Memorial Hospital in Polk County was open and providing care. Still, due to the power outages, it was operating on a generator.
“Our teams are dedicated to providing care and comfort to our patients and guests during this emergency,” said Scott Packard, hospital spokesperson.
Kari Miller, an assistant to Polk County Judge Sydney Murphy, said the cooling stations across Polk County had been set up partly to mitigate health problems.
At the commerce center, where the Suski family was cooling off, Polk County established an overnight area to help those residents who rely on oxygen tanks to stay. They also began screening people with other problems to see if they would qualify for overnight assistance.
“We’re not set up as a hospital, so there’s only so much we can do,” Miller said. “But if somebody needs to be plugged into oxygen, they’re welcome here.”
Marissa Suski worries about what they will do at night after the cooling center closes if they don’t qualify to stay there. Her husband can barely breathe in the heat.
The couple are among potentially thousands of East Texans who must find a way to stay medically safe after Hurricane Beryl smashed through several counties, knocking out electricity. Power companies and elected officials said it might be days before electricity is restored.
As of Wednesday morning, most electricity customers in coastal Brazoria County, most of Polk, San Jacinto, and Trinity counties and a sizable portion of Harris County, the state’s most populous, remained powerless.
CenterPoint, which maintains the power poles and wires that deliver electricity in Houston and its surrounding communities, said in a Monday press release that the storm more heavily impacted the company’s infrastructure than it anticipated based on earlier storm path projections. This has caught the ire of Texans and lawmakers.
“CenterPoint’s deficient efforts to restore power are putting people with serious medical conditions in danger of loss of life, as evidenced by the fact that hospitals are now unable to send patients home where they lack power for medical equipment or an appropriately cool environment for their conditions,” U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D- Houston, said in a statement released Wednesday.
One woman in Galveston County has already died because her oxygen machine ran out of battery, said John Florence, an investigator with the county's Medical Examiner, on Tuesday.
Jess Huff, Pooja Salhotra, and John Jordan contributed to this story.
Disclosure: Texas Hospital Association has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
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