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HOUSTON — Mauricio Marin felt his heart tighten when the power flicked off at his Richmond, Texas, home on the evening of Feb. 14, shutting down his plug-in breathing machine. Gasping, he rushed to connect himself to one of the portable oxygen tanks his doctors had sent home with him weeks earlier to help his lungs recover after his three-week stay in a Covid-19 intensive care unit.
Between the two portable tanks, he calculated, he had six hours of air.
Marin, 44, and his wife had heard there might be brief, rolling power outages — 45 minutes or an hour, at most — as a massive winter storm swept across Texas last month, overwhelming the state’s electric grid. After more than two hours without electricity, he started to worry.
Marin tried to slow his breathing, hoping to ration his limited oxygen supply as he lay awake all night, watching the needle on each tank’s gauge slowly turn toward zero. The next morning, his wife, Daysi, made frantic calls to the power company and Marin’s doctor’s office, but nobody was answering in the midst of the storm.
For the next two days, Marin struggled for air and shivered under a pile of blankets. On the morning of Feb. 17, as they were still without power, his wife begged him to return to the hospital. But they feared driving on icy roads, and by then neither of them could get a consistent signal to call for help, as the widespread outages had knocked cellphone towers offline. And Marin didn’t want to go. He was terrified by the prospect of another hospital stay without visitors.
Marin’s skin was slowly turning purple, and he began to cry.
“Honey,” he later remembered telling his wife, straining with each word, “at least I’m going to die with you and my kids and not alone at the hospital.”
Marin said his life was spared when a neighbor showed up at the door with an oxygen tank a few hours later, sustaining him until the power returned. But he said his doctors fear that the weeklong ordeal inflicted additional damage on his lungs and jeopardized his already tenuous recovery.
Medical experts say Marin is part of a particularly vulnerable group who suffered significant hardships and potentially lasting harm as a result of the outages: those recovering at home from Covid-19.
At the peak of the outages last month, nearly 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses were without power, sparking calls for investigations of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the nonprofit that operates the power grid spanning most of the state, and the Texas Public Utility Commission, which oversees the state’s electric and water utilities. Two board members of the utility commission and six members of the ERCOT board resigned and the ERCOT CEO was fired after sharp criticism that they had not done enough to prepare for winter storms and had ignored warnings about the danger severe weather poses to the state’s electric grid.
Meanwhile, the human toll is still being tallied. Dozens of Texans have filed lawsuits against ERCOT and local power companies. Some of the suits allege that medically fragile children and adults suffered permanent or severe injuries because they were unable to get electricity to power life-sustaining medical equipment. Others have been filed by the surviving loved ones of older residents who died of hypothermia in their homes.
Among those demanding accountability are some Texans recovering from Covid-19 who say the prolonged outages further imperiled their already fragile health.
One woman said she was diagnosed with a fairly minor case of Covid-19 in early February. But after more than two days in her frigid Houston home without power or heat, she said, her symptoms became severe. She had dizziness and difficulty breathing, forcing her to seek care at an emergency room, according to a lawsuit filed in Harris County that accuses ERCOT and her utility CenterPoint Energy of negligence.
Five hours southwest, in Hidalgo County, another woman was sent home with an oxygen machine to recover from Covid-19 after a three-week hospital stay. As she struggled for days to breathe and keep warm without power, she feared she was going to die, according to a lawsuit she filed against ERCOT and her power company, AEP Texas. After her power was restored, the woman had trouble breathing even with her oxygen machine, forcing her to seek medical care, the complaint alleges.
Mauricio and Daysi Marin have filed their own lawsuit in Harris County district court against ERCOT and CenterPoint Energy.
“I told Mauricio, ‘We've got to do something about this. This cannot happen again,’” Daysi Marin said. “We need to speak out and we need to say something.”
ERCOT said it had no comment regarding the Marin lawsuit, and did not respond to a subsequent email seeking comment on the two other cases. A spokesperson for AEP said the company does not comment on pending litigation. In a statement, Olivia Koch, a spokesperson for CenterPoint Energy, said that though she couldn’t comment on pending litigation, the company is fully committed to working with stakeholders to address the issues related to the storm.
“We understand the severe impact that the historic weather and generation shortfall emergency had on all Houstonians and Texans,” she wrote in an email.
Covid-19 has created a major disaster to our lives, especially for people who are recovering. The government has not solved people's life problems, and the recovered patients are also threatened by their lives.