SPRING, Texas — With power outages caused by Hurricane Beryl and temperatures soaring in the home that Houston-area resident Janet Jarrett shares with her sister, she did all she could to keep her 64-year-old sister cool.
But on the fourth day after the power went out, Pamela Jarrett, who was in a wheelchair and relied on a feeding tube, woke up to the sound of her gasping for breath. Paramedics were called, but she was pronounced dead at hospital, and the coroner said the cause was heat exposure.
“This should never have happened to her and now it’s so hard to find out she’s gone,” Janet Jarrett said.
Nearly two weeks after Beryl struck, the storm’s death toll in Texas has risen to at least 23, with some people dying from heatstroke due to extended power outages.
Searing summer heat, combined with residents being without air conditioning for days, made conditions increasingly dangerous in parts of America’s fourth-largest city after the Category 1 storm made landfall on July 8.
Beryl knocked out power to about three million homes and businesses at its peak, causing outages that lasted for days or more, and hospitals reported a sharp increase in heatstroke cases.
After more than a week of widespread blackouts, power was finally restored to most areas last week. The delays in restoring power to the Houston area have put the region’s power company, CenterPoint Energy, under scrutiny for whether it was adequately prepared.
It may be weeks or even years before the full death toll from the Texas storm is known, but experts say knowing the numbers can help plan for the future.
What do we know so far about the fatalities?
Some people died from falling trees and drowned when their cars were submerged in floodwaters soon after the storm hit, causing high winds and flooding. Others died days after the storm after falling while cutting damaged tree branches and from heat stroke.
Half of the storm-related deaths in Harris County, home to Houston, were due to heat stroke, according to the Harris County Forensic Science Institute.
Ms Jarrett, who has been caring for her sister since she was injured in an attack six years ago, said her “sassy” sister had done it all, from running a vintage shop in Harlem, New York, to working as an artist.
“She had a big personality,” Jarrett said, adding that her sister had been in good health before the power went out at their Spring home.
When will the full death toll be known?
The death toll is likely to rise as power outages and restoration efforts are still ongoing.
Officials are still working to determine whether some of the deaths that have already occurred are storm-related, but even once those figures are known, it could take more time to get an accurate count of the storm’s death toll.
Lara Anton, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, which uses death certificate data to identify storm fatalities, estimated that even a preliminary death toll may not be known until the end of July.
The state’s vital statistics system has a prompt to indicate if a death is related to the storm, and medical certifiers are being asked to submit additional information about how the death is related to the storm, Anton said.
Experts say that while storm-related death counts compiled from death certificates are useful, a more complete picture of the toll comes from analyzing excess deaths that occurred during and after the storm. To do this, researchers compare the number of people who died during that period with the number who would be expected to die under normal circumstances.
Dr. Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, said analyzing excess deaths can help count deaths that may have been overlooked.
What do the different toll numbers indicate?
Gregory Wellenius, director of the Center for Climate Health at the Boston University School of Public Health, said both the death certificate count approach and the excess deaths calculation approach have their merits when it comes to storms.
Analysis of excess deaths allows for more accurate estimates of the total number of people who have died, which can be useful not only for assessing the impacts of climate change but also for public health and emergency management planning, he said.
But that “doesn’t tell us who died,” he said, adding that understanding the individual circumstances of storm deaths is important in determining what puts individual people at risk.
“Simply saying 200 people died doesn’t convey what happened to those people. It tells us what we can do better to prepare for the future or help people prepare,” Wellenius said.
