I just saw a son whose mother died in the nursing home on TV. He sounded sad, but where was he during the storm. They lived close enough that he showed up at the hospital right away when they contacted him. He didn’t check up on his mother all this time to know they didn’t have AC?! They asked him what his mother was like. He said, “She was just like any American walking down the street…” Oh really?! I could understand if those elderlies didn’t have any relatives to check up on them, but when they had grown kids…where were they? I certainly hope those kids/relatives are not going to benefit from those elderlies’ death.
Apparently, the nursing home staff had been calling Florida Power and Light since Monday to fix a fuse or something in a transformer that later blew on Tuesday. FPL doesn’t classify nursing homes as highest priority and they hadn’t shown up even though they said they would.
Still, it’s on the nursing home staff that they didn’t seem to notice how much the high temps were harming people. Once hospital workers came over, they organized evacuating everyone. If the nursing home staff is that incompetant, I doubt they notified family members about the problem.
Sorry , @oldfort, That is very harsh. We can’t know the details of every family’s situation. I think most families that do have a family member in a nursing home care deeply but just cannot have them in their own home. You pray that your family member will be well taken care of by a facility. Family members may have been dealing with their own scary situations in their own homes and didn’t know the situation was so dire. We just don’t know.
Found out that a close PhD-student friend’s sister and her family lived on St. Thomas. They’re alive and unhurt, but they’ve lost EVERYTHING.
We started a fund for them and have raised a few thousand dollars from various faculty, staff, and students.
The thing her sister was more upset about than anything? That her kids are going to miss a significant amount of school. They’re trying to get resettled somewhere so that the kids don’t miss too much, but that’s not even something I had remotely thought about.
@sevmom You are exactly right. I have worked in healthcare for over three decades and I have learned not to judge families. No one knows what happened in the past. Not every family is Leave It To Beaver or Father Knows Best. It also doesn’t take long for frail elderly people to become hyperthermic. It is a terrible tragedy all around.
That was not our experience last year from Matthew, nor that of anyone we knew who had sustained damage. The work started immediately and the insurance company paid the contractors directly upon completion of the work.
No, I do not have the full story about this family as to why the son who lived so close could’t have checked up on his mother until someone (reporter) called him to let him know his mother was dead. So many people were so outraged when pets were left behind and not being cared for during the storm. I am outraged that those elderlies were not better taken of by their families and by the general public. They were forgotten.
@alwaysamom, iirc you are in Hilton Head. I can guarantee that did not happen in the poor communities affected by Mathew or any other hurricane.
And many of the poorest are renters, many of those not having renters’ insurance.
And not having money to replace what they did have. Very sad for so many.
@oldfort Elderly , frail people can decline within minutes to hours. If this happened at the height of the storm , help may not have been available quickly. I disagree that they were forgotten.
I can understand not moving a parent from the nursing home before hurricane hit but I can’t imagine not being with my mom day and night if she was in a nursing home after the hurricane, knowing about all the power outages in Florida. It’s oppressively hot and humid at this time of the year. How can the nursing home administrators and staff not know how dangerous this situation was - and with a hospital just across the street they could have reached out to for help!?!?!?
They had power. Maybe that’s all the son knew and he assumed the AC was working too. The AC went out because of a transformer failure outside the facility but the rest of the power was on.
Good point Greenwich. I didn’t know they had power.
I have evacuated nursing home residents twice because of hurricanes . It is a very intense process. The nursing home where I worked also took ventilator patients . These were the only residents that were transported and evacuated to the hospital because of limited space and the need to not overtax the hospitals for incoming casualties . Most residents in nursing homes are chronically ill. Finding places to evacuate these residents to is not an easy task. Most of the time they are sent to other nursing homes inland which taxes those nursing homes as well. Many of these residents are bed bound and WC bound and transportation is very difficult , especially with a storm the size of Irma. Unless you’ve been through it , you have no idea the undertaking it is. It’s tragic. I am not excusing any one,but more investigation needs to happen before assuming anything IMO.
" I can’t imagine not being with my mother day and night if she was in a nursing home after the hurricane. " I can. They are there usually because they need to be there and have caretakers there. And families may have their own situations they need to deal with. And these kinds of things, luckily , are rare. I just think it’s a slippery slope to judge other families based on what you think you would have done.
I’m not judging other families, I am speaking for myself. I’d be a nervous wreck if my mom was in a nursing/rehab after the hurricane. Especially after what happened in NOLA after Katrina.
@emilybee …“Especially after what happened in NOLA after Katrina.”
Yeah. You would think that after Katrina nursing home managers would have a plan. It’s not as if there are never hurricanes in Florida. I can’t imagine the suffering those poor souls endured. But as @carolinamom2boys says we should withhold judgement until there is an investigation.
I spent the weekend in the Outer Banks putting stuff on my lower level up 18" from the ground, mainly for future storms (Jose?). They’ve had terrible surf and Monday the water was sucked out of the sound. Weird. It was not raining or anything. I do not have cable so I was spared the antics of Weather Channel reporters. A boy my youngest son’s age, 17, was killed there surfing. His body was found today. The Atlantic has been posting great photos. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/09/the-wreckage-left-in-irmas-path-across-the-caribbean-and-southeastern-us/539718/
