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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.
Alton Ambush stands outside of his apartment in the Meyerland area on Thursday, July 18, 2024, in Houston. Ambush tried to save the life of his neighbor, who died when the power remained off for several days after Hurricane Beryl.
Karen Warren/Staff photographer
Alton Ambush and his dog, Amber, on the stairway between his Houston apartment on the right, and the apartment of his neighbor who overheated during the CenterPoint power outages after Hurricane Beryl. Ambush tried to save his neighbor’s life, but she died on July 11, 2024.
Karen Warren/Staff photographer
Richard Reyes, 73, shows his Hurricane Beryl-flooded bedroom in Houston’s Aldine neighborhood. Reyes’ house took on about two feel of water, and he had to throw out most of his furniture before his power was restored a week after the storm.
Yi-Chin Lee/Staff photographer
Alfredo H. cuts fallen pine trees days after Beryl, Friday, July 12, 2024, in Dickinson.
Ishika Samant/Staff photographerA Houston police officer carries a case of water to a car outside of Sunnyside Health and Multi-Service Center during a distribution of water and ice on Wednesday, July 10, 2024, after Hurricane Beryl hit the Houston area on Monday.Karen Warren/Staff photographer
Trees that fell during Hurricane Beryl remain perched on houses in the Homestead neighborhood of Houston on Wednesday, July 10, 2024.
Elizabeth Conley/Staff Photographer
A Lineman tends to fallen power lines in the East End neighborhood of Houston, days after Hurricane Beryl made landfall.
Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographerKeyla Herrera entertains her eight-month-old daughter, Emma, with a movie on her cell phone with her husband, Edgar, as they sat inside of the cooling center set up inside of Sunnyside Health and Multi-Service Center on Wednesday, July 10, 2024, after Hurricane Beryl hit the Houston area on Monday.Karen Warren/Staff photographerFallen power lines and construction demolished by Hurricane Beryl are seen in the East End neighborhood of Houston, days after Hurricane Beryl made landfall, on Thursday, July 11, 2024 in Houston.Raquel Natalicchio/Staff photographer
Utility trucks park along Broadway near the Houston causeway Thursday, July 11, 2024, as crews repair power lines downed as Hurricane Beryl made landfall.
Kirk Sides/Staff photographer
Teams worked to clear branches and debris from downed trees in Fort Bend County after Hurricane Beryl tore through the Houston area.
Fort Bend County
That night, rattled neighbors gathered on their front porches to escape their own ovenlike apartments.
“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-drunk red Gatorade.
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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.
IMPACTS: What does Hurricane Beryl show us about our relationship with Houston?
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.
Power line personnel repair a broken power pole along Broadway near the Houston causeway Thursday, July 11, 2024, as crews repair power lines downed by Hurricane Beryl.
Kirk Sides/Staff photographer
Counted? Maybe not
“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.
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“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.
The Texas Medical Center was swamped with patients but remained open with power throughout Hurricane Beryl and its aftermath. This February 2024 file photo shows the Texas Children’s Hospital, MD Anderson Cancer Center and the John P. McGovern Texas Medical Center Commons.
Jason Fochtman/Staff photographer
Mullan is not on any list of lives lost to Beryl. Like Cox, she stayed home through the heat. Her story made the news only because a firetruck barreled down the street to try to save her just as local television reporter Jason Miles was talking to her neighbors about their ninth day in the dark.
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“She’s renting from my daughter, so I came to check on her, and she didn’t answer. So therefore I unlocked the door and found her,” neighbor Pat Baker told Miles. “It’s just been hot and miserable and I’m just sick of this!”
INVESTIGATION: CenterPoint spent $800M on mobile generators. Where are they post-Hurricane Beryl?
Records from the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences show that Mullan had underlying conditions such as cardiovascular disease, among other triggers, but do not account for her week and a half in the heat.
Data from heatstroke patients who have been treated since Hurricane Beryl offer a sense of proportion that death counts could be missing. In the days after the storm, the Houston Health Department tracked heat-related visits to area medical providers and saw that they ballooned to almost 3½ times the previous week’s tally.
Even before Beryl marked Houston’s second days-long power outage this year — a straight-line storm, or derecho, was the first culprit, in May — Texas’ heat death counts were on the rise. Data from the Department of State Health Services shows that at least 362 Texans died from the heat in 2023, the third record-breaking tally in as many years.
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“We’re in this new climate right now. And all we know is it’s getting more unpredictable, more chaotic and hotter,” said Jeff Goodell, Austin-based author of “The Heat Will Kill You First.” Goodell said he thinks we’ll never know the full number of lives Beryl took because the heat death tallies we have now in the state are “the vaguest kind of guesses.”
More than a week after Cox’s death, it is still listed by the medical examiner as “pending.”
A missing piece
Once CenterPoint restored power, Cox’s apartment block slipped into its old routines. Residents, many recently off the streets, chatted over the hum of air conditioners. Margie Robbins could charge her phone, check on her family. Patrick “Lucky” Sowell stopped sleeping on his front porch.
But the storm left them a twin-sized gap. Neighbors said the Cox sisters had been kind, smiley and always together, walking to the store for chips and sodas side by side. After Cox died, her sister also disappeared, whisked away by an ambulance when she could not break free of her panic.
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“They’ve been together since conception. It’s just horrible,” said Jana Bennett, who said Cox was “90 pounds soaking wet,” and middle aged — definitely not old. “She didn’t have to die.”
Bennett was mad from the day first responders, cops and coroners swarmed the complex for Cox, bringing in the most outside faces residents had seen since the Category 1 hurricane caught them by surprise. She was still mad a week later.
Though the region’s leaders had posted online notices for cooling and distribution centers in the days after Beryl, with no power or internet, no open corner stores or nearby gas stations, many people missed the information on where to get help. Others had no way to reach it.
A number of heat victims also underestimated their own risk.
Kevin Miller, an extreme heat researcher at Texas State University, said a person is in danger of dying from heatstroke once their body temperature hits about 105 degrees for over half an hour. But as people age, they have a harder time recognizing how hot they are getting. Plus, weakened or unprepared bodies can face risks even in less extreme conditions.
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“When you have a traumatic event like a hurricane, that knocks power out, and now people can’t cool themselves. That’s classic heatstroke,” Miller said. And humidity makes it worse.
DERECHO: Houston threatened by sweltering heat after storm’s destruction and ongoing power outages
Heat’s damage to the body can go beyond the heart, liver and kidneys, he said. Toxins released into the bloodstream during muscle breakdown can also target the lungs and brain, or even trigger an autoimmune response.
Austin Lewellen pulls down wet insulation from the ceiling as volunteers with the nonprofit West Street Recovery help Deborah Powell muck out her home after damage from Hurricane Beryl, Friday, July 12, 2024, in Houston.
Jason Fochtman/Staff photographer
In the case of James Edward Butcher, a 75-year-old who lived among a strip of small homes off Randolph Road in Pasadena, authorities have not said which organs failed. Instead, the medical examiner reported a single cause for his July 11 death: hyperthermia.
Butcher is one of 11 Houston-area victims of Hurricane Beryl-triggered heat death that authorities have confirmed so far.
He lived alone, but his landlord’s wife would check up on him, said Delia Martinez, whose own house sits at the end of the same dirt road. She said Butcher started having trouble breathing but refused to leave during the outage to stay with his dog.
The landlord’s wife found him dead hours before his power came back on.
“She came rushing out of his door. My window was open at the time, I was cleaning the house, and I just saw her break down crying,” Martinez said.
It took the whole day, she said, for a coroner to take his body away.
Grief and what remains
Beryl’s path of damage did not stop at Houston’s city limits or trace the edge of Harris County. Many jurisdictions that dip their territorial toes into Houston’s metropolitan area were hit hard.
And then there was coastal Galveston County. Surfside homes were reduced to timber, trains were derailed and at least five people died — four or more triggered by heat from loss of power. All of Galveston’s electrical distributors, including CenterPoint, had mass power outages after debris and wind downed exposed wires.
A-frame houses are seen the day after Hurricane Beryl made landfall nearby Tuesday, July 9, 2024, in Surfside Beach.Jon Shapley/Staff photographer
D.J. Florence, chief investigator for the Galveston County Medical Examiner’s Office, thinks victims of the outages’ oppressive heat could continue to surface.
“If you have somebody that lives alone, and nobody is checking on them, it could be weeks,” Florence said.
Those who have already been found dead had people stopping by. Some had friends or family knocking on their doors. One man was even found by a maintenance worker: The man left his apartment door open while the power was out, and it was still ajar once the air conditioning came back on, prompting the worker to check inside.
“It looked like he had gone into the bathroom and had some type of event, passed out on the floor and died there,” Florence said.
MENTAL HEALTH: Post-Beryl stress, fear, guilt is real, doctors say. Here’s how to cope.
The death of Cox, the Meyerland twin, sent a more immediate shiver through her area.
Svetlana Galustyan sat in the boarded-up doorway of her sweltering grocery store that Thursday night, worrying about her weakened heart as she ate takeout pizza with her husband in front of wasted fridges once filled with imported cheese and fish.
“That woman passed away. People died, died. For sick, for old people like us, it is too hot.” Still, “nobody feels responsible,” not the government, not the power companies, Galustyan said.
Ambush stumbled over his staccato recollection of Cox’s death. Long pauses intersected the 51-year-old’s jumps to Cox’s panic in the heat, his suggestion that she shower to stay cool, her limp limbs, the 911 call, his attempts to bring her back. And her sister, he kept coming back to her sister, whom neighbors had not seen since.
“That’s a messed-up situation, watching a sister die on you like that. They were close, they were close. Frick and Frack, Tom and Jerry,” he said.
As he reflected on the death, Ambush spotted the half-drunk Gatorade sitting beside her door.
He lunged to clean it up. He fell unusually quiet, for a moment. He turned away.
Alton Ambush and his dog, Amber, between his Houston apartment on the right, and the apartment of his neighbor who overheated during the CenterPoint power outages after Hurricane Beryl. Ambush tried to save her life, but she died on July 11, 2024.
Karen Warren/Staff photographer
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