Residents, meanwhile, scrambled to board up windows and stock up on food ahead of the storm, which is forecast to grow into a potentially deadly major hurricane before it roars ashore early on Tuesday.
Generators are an urgent matter in Florida, an aging state where some 190,000 people live in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. DeSantis’ predecessor, Rick Scott, signed the March 2018 law requiring nursing homes to be able to keep temperatures at or below 81 degrees Fahrenheit (27°C) for at least 72 hours after losing power.
The law followed problems in the wake of 2017’s Hurricane Irma, which knocked out electricity to a wide swath of the state. This week, police in Hollywood, Florida, charged four nursing home employees with causing the deaths of 12 patients in the sweltering heat of a power outage that followed Irma.
“There are going to be site checks, there are going to be phone calls to make sure that they have a plan to deal with folks that are in their care,” DeSantis said.
The picture is brighter among the state’s 3,061 assisted-living facilities, which can house 106,086 people. Fully 94.3% of those sites have permanent generators in place, according to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration.
State legislative records, however, show hundreds of nursing homes have received waivers allowing them to operate with temporary generators, even though the 2018 law intended for all sites to have permanent generators by the start of last year’s hurricane season.
“There are tens of thousands, multiple tens of thousands of people whose safety could be at risk in this situation. And we’ve had two years to prepare for this,” said Dave Bruns, a spokesman for the Florida chapter of AARP, a group representing Americans aged 50 and over, in a phone interview. “That we find ourselves in this situation is disappointing.”
The state AHCS agency, which oversees nursing home and assisted-living facilities in the state, said it was working to ensure that all those sites complied with the law.
“Our agency remains committed to making sure long term care facilities can support safe conditions during loss of power,” AHCA Secretary Mary Mayhew said in a statement.
“These aren’t generators that you go to Home Depot and purchase and plug in,” Knapp said. She added that following the declaration of a state of emergency, nursing home operators had 24 hours to get their temporary generators delivered: “Ideally, those generators are all going to be in place before Dorian even makes landfall.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-storm-dorian-nursing-homes/as-dorian-nears-florida-nursing-homes-face-heat-for-lacking-generators-idUSKCN1VK2AA
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