In January of this month, P4P project director Eric Cote traveled to Houston, TX to introduce the Texas Governor’s Committee on People with Disabilities (GCPD) to the Power Outage Partners initiative, a groundbreaking program Cote helped the Louisiana Department of Health launch as a pilot in 2021.
The pilot sought to provide invasively ventilated Louisianans living at home with funding to purchase additional battery capacity for ventilators and other life support equipment, allowing more time for safe evacuations. In short duration outages, the need for evacuation could be eliminated.
In 2023, Ron Lucey, the executive director of the Texas Governor’s Committee on People with Disabilities (GCPD), heard Cote give a presentation on the Louisiana project and reached out to initiate discussions about a possible Texas project. Lucey’s interest was driven largely by Winter Storm Uri, which struck Texas in February 2021 and triggered prolonged and widespread power outages, resulting in the deaths of 248 Texans, including a Crosby, TX resident who depended on an oxygen concentrator.
The death of another oxygen-dependent Texan following Hurricane Beryl in July 2024 furthered Lucey’s interest in working with Cote. Since Cote’s presentation to the GCPD Board of Directors, he has been working with Lucey and other disability advocates in Texas to secure funding for an initiative. Among the organizations Cote is working closely with is the TexMEP Association, a nonprofit that represents durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers in Texas. TexMEP has been working with Lucey since Winter Storm Uri to foster closer collaboration between DME suppliers and government agencies.
“We learned in Louisiana that DME suppliers have access to unique and highly valuable data about electricity-dependent individuals that government agencies had never sought to leverage,” said Cote. “We were able to bridge that gap thanks to help from several DME suppliers, who provided us with deidentified information about their customers, including the number and type of devices being used, their frequency of use and their existing backup power resources. This information enabled us to determine how much additional battery capacity each customer would need to achieve 24 hours of runtime for their medical devices during a power outage. That was a real breakthrough that can help save lives in future disasters.”
Cote said the cooperation he received from DME suppliers in Louisiana has continued in Texas thanks to the TexMEP Association. “I’ve been working closely with Mark Gowen of Angell Medical Supply, one of the founders of the TexMEP Association, to develop an action plan in Texas that will leverage the untapped data DME suppliers have about their clients,” said Cote. “Success on this front will enable us to create a census of DME users in Texas, an unprecedented outcome that will greatly enhance the ability of local government agencies to prioritize power outage support for their most vulnerable electricity-dependent residents.”