Growing Power Outages Grave Threat For Those Dependent On Medical Devices To Live; Climate Change

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- David Taylor, who has muscular dystrophy, relies on a ventilator to live. During the power outages across Texas in February, he had to be transported to a hospital before his ventilator's backup battery ran out.
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'Growing Power Outages Pose Grave Threat To People Who Need Medical Equipment To Live,' NPR, May 15, 2021.

For four decades, David Taylor has relied on a ventilator to breathe, the whoosh, whoosh of the machine part of the background metronome of daily life. Then, on the night of Feb. 14, an Arctic blast began to overwhelm the Texas power grid. The next morning, the electricity flickered out in the Fort Worth home that the 65-year-old shares with his mother. David's ventilator switched over at some point to a backup battery and kept running. A family member brought over a generator and spent several hours trying, unsuccessfully, to get it working in the sub-freezing air. By nightfall, the one-story house had gone around 12 hours without power, other than an hour or so when the lights briefly turned on, recalled David's 89-year-old mother, Dorothy Taylor.
The temperature inside had dropped to the low 50s. David, who has muscular dystrophy, remained in bed beneath a pile of blankets.

Dorothy kept one eye on the clock, unsure how much longer her son's backup battery would hold out. "I couldn't wait 'til the last minute," she says. "He would die within minutes."

Across Texas, other families were facing similar dilemmas. The ambulance provider MedStar, which serves the greater Fort Worth area, fielded more than 50 calls — including Dorothy's — from Feb. 15 to Feb. 17 involving patients with life-sustaining medical devices and no power. A San Antonio emergency room doctor, Ralph Riviello, tells Undark that around 18 to 24 people showed up at his hospital during the crisis, desperate to recharge medical equipment.

Near Houston, a 75-year-old man froze to death in his truck; his family believes he ventured out to get a spare oxygen tank from the vehicle after losing electricity at his home.

These are not just one-off tragedies. Some experts warn that complex home-based medical care is on a collision course with climate change, as severe weather events become more frequent nationwide. While it's difficult to attribute a single weather event like the Texas Arctic blast to climate change, these crises have become more frequent in recent years as the planet warms, highlighting the need to protect such vulnerable individuals, says Sue Anne Bell, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan who studies the health effects of disasters. "Thinking that you've had your once-in-a-100-year storm — that's not a reality anymore," she says.

At the same time that climate change has fueled a rise in severe events, the power grid is aging. By the 2000s, there were 10 times more major power outages reported each year compared with the 1980s and early 1990s, according to an analysis of data from 1984 to 2012 by the nonprofit news organization Climate Central. They were mostly driven by severe weather, though changes in data collection likely contributed as well. "We have climate change coming, which is going to throw at us more of these curve balls, more of these unexpected events that can impact the infrastructure," says Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at Columbia University who has studied the health impact of power outages.

Casey is among a cadre of researchers, environmentalists and physicians who are trying to draw attention to the growing threat of power outages for people with medical devices...

More, https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/15/996872685/growing-power-outages-pose-grave-threat-to-people-who-need-medical-equipment-to-