Two days after Hurricane Beryl slammed into Texas, Janet and Pamela Jarrett still had no power in the Houston home the sisters shared. A heat advisory was in effect.
They passed the evening playing Pamela’s favorite game, Connect 4. All seemed well enough.
But early the next morning, Janet found Pamela, 64, who was disabled and used a wheelchair, struggling to breathe.
“I heard her heavy breathing, gasping for air,” Janet said. “That’s something that doesn’t leave your mind. It doesn’t go away. Even when I go to sleep and I’m laying there, I hear it. It’s like I’m living it all over again.”
Pamela died on the way to the hospital on July 11. Her official cause of death: hyperthermia due to environmental heat exposure.
The same cause of death is listed for one-third of the 21 confirmed deaths in Texas caused by Hurricane Beryl, meaning they happened not because of the typical threats a storm brings — flooding or falling trees — but instead as a result of severe heat amid the widespread power outages during and after the storm. Heat indexes, or the “feels like” temperatures, soared into the triple digits in the days after the storm.
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