![]() ![]() Click here to become one.Vehicles trapped under heavy snow in the streets of downtown Buffalo, New York, on December 26Picture: AFP PHOTO / THE OFFICE OF GOVERNOR KATHY HOCHULīuffalo has been particularly hard hit due to a phenomenon know as “lake effect snow”. Thank you for reading and supporting our work, which would not be possible without our subscribers. This project's public service mission is to shine a light on the failures in hopes that solutions will be found, so that when the next freezing storm strikes our region, no one will die needlessly. Editors Roberto Villalpando and Andy Alford oversaw the work. The presentation is the result of a design and digital team that built the display, so it is clean and easy to follow. Jay Janner, a veteran and decorated visual journalist, captured images of the devastation. Our project today was also made possible thanks to a large team of journalists, beyond the bylines. Our public records gathering was slowed because the office does not accept credit or debit cards for payments. You can pay only by a company check or money order, so for one batch we ran to an H-E-B to get a money order and mail it to the medical examiner's office. The medical examiner's office charged us hundreds of dollars for its reports. We will continue to follow this tragedy. A patchwork of difficult-to-access county records and a lack of a public statewide list has made it impossible to confirm whether Texas is counting everyone who died in the freeze. This storm was no surprise, either, since reports predicted its severity. In the aftermath, newsrooms nationally and across Texas, including the Statesman, have documented the collapse of the power grid and the failure to improve the system 10 years after a similar deadly freeze. Many of those victims were vulnerable: older or in poor health or suffering from addiction or homelessness. And industry lobbyists successfully fought against meaningful changes, citing costs, during the most recent legislative session, our reporting found. ![]() ![]() ![]() The lack of generators to power care centers left many older residents exposed. One assisted living facility did not have a working defibrillator. Audio recordings depict a scene where ice on roads prevented first responders from quickly reaching patients.ĭays of cold and death: Amid power loss, Austin's death toll climbed 20 as 911 operators tried to help nursing home caregivers with instructions on how to perform CPR and to guide medics and firefighters to where residents were in trouble. The reporting also paints a desperate scene during the period from Feb. Three died in a house fire another died of chronic kidney disease without access to her dialysis center. Once Hall obtained the records, she and the team tracked down relatives, friends and neighbors to give voice to those who died, in many instances alone and from hypothermia. "Yet it took us so long to get the names of the victims from government agencies." "This was an international news story," Hall said. So Hall and the team built their own list and confirmed deaths using not only the medical examiner's reports but also 911 records, state health reports, news stories, police documents and statements from families and first responders. However, Hall quickly learned that the office was not responsible for documenting all deaths that occurred in the county that week. The Travis County medical examiner's office in the summer shared a spreadsheet of all the cases the office received during the February freeze. 'She was my everything': A chaotic week of preventable deaths in Austin as Texas froze At least 28 people locally died as a result of the freeze, but an accurate number might never be known. Today we publish our report because the public needs to know the human toll of the power grid failure. The investigation has been a passion project for the reporters and nothing short of a battle to obtain death records. These are the devastating details American-Statesman journalists Katie Hall, Kelsey Bradshaw and Heather Osbourne found during months of reporting to determine whose deaths were related to the freeze in February. Temperatures so cold that toilet water turned to ice, and one woman's catheter froze, eventually killing her. ![]()
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