Most Houston hurricane deaths due to heat

HOUSTON – Lisa Diane Cox stumbled out of her sweltering Meyerland apartment and told neighbors that “she was on fire, she said she was dying,” days after Hurricane Beryl knocked out the CenterPoint Energy lines that powered their homes. The next morning Cox lay limp beside her twin sister, her body ice cold. Alton Ambush, who lived next door, raced to perform CPR as the ambulance came. That night, rattled neighbors gathered on their front porches to escape their own ovenlike apartments. Article continues below this ad “We just lost a neighbor to the heat,” Stephanie Blaylock said, nodding toward a nearby porch strewn with colorful rag rugs, an empty water bottle and a half-drank red Gatorade. Hurricane Beryl claimed at least 22 lives in the Houston area. Recent additions to the list include 11 people who died from hyperthermia, or overheating, after sitting without power for days in homes pummeled by a feverish Texas summer. At the height of the outages, CenterPoint, Houston’s main power distributor, had over 2.26 million customers with no electricity. When Cox died three days after the storm hit, over a million were still waiting on a fix.

Beryl’s official death toll will likely continue to climb, but experts said the final number is expected to have major gaps, especially among those found dead in powerless buildings with triple-digit temperatures. “The count of people dying from heat-related illness is underestimated,” said Dr. Sadeer Al-Kindi, a cardiologist at Houston Methodist who has researched environmental health. “Especially when people pass away at home. Even if you do an autopsy, there are no specific characteristics that you would find on an autopsy that would link to heat,” he said. Instead, high temperatures cause victims’ organs to fail faster, and medical examiners often list a person’s cause of death as the liver failure, kidney failure or heart attack they can see, rather than the hyperthermia they cannot. Though Houston officials have kept tabs on Beryl losses, any “natural deaths” not filed as heat-triggered remain uncounted. This seemed to be the case for Dorothy Mullan, a Museum District resident who was found dead July 16. She lived less than a five-minute drive from Houston’s world-class Texas Medical Center, whose electrical supply never faltered after the storm, but died in her sweltering apartment.