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Texas electricity providers Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and Entergy Corporation have been hit with a $ 100 million lawsuit charging them with gross negligence in the death of a child whose family suspects suffered hypothermia when they lost power and heat in their mobile home during a historic cold snap.
Cristian Pineda’s mother, 11, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Jefferson County District Court, alleging that utility giants “put profits before people’s well-being” in ignoring previous recommendations to winterize its power grid, which suffered an epic failure in the past week and left more than 4 million customers without heat and power as temperatures in parts of the state plummeted to single digits.
“Although they were aware of the bad weather forecast for at least a week in advance and the system was not prepared for more than a decade, ERCOT and Entergy took no preventative action that would have were able to avoid the crisis and were totally unprepared to deal with the current crisis, ”says the lawsuit.
Cristian died on Tuesday in his family’s mobile home in suburban Houston, Conroe, as he shared a bed with his 3-year-old brother under a pile of blankets in an attempt to keep warm, according to the lawsuit.
The sixth grader, who emigrated to the United States two years ago with his family, was a healthy boy who, the day before his death, was playing in the snow for the first time in his life, his mother said , Maria Pineda, in Houston. The Chronicle.
Maria Pineda found her son unresponsive the next day and called 911 as he tried to resuscitate CPR, the lawsuit said.
While the Pineda family claim the child froze to death, the official cause of death awaits the results of an autopsy, according to the Conroe Police Department.
Entergy issued a statement to ABC KTRK station in Houston saying, “We are deeply saddened by the loss of life in our community. We cannot comment due to the ongoing litigation.”
ERCOT, which manages the power grid for more than 25 million customers, said in a statement that it has yet to review the lawsuit but “will respond accordingly once we do.”
“Our hearts go out to all Texans who have suffered and are suffering over the past week,” the ERCOT statement continued.
Entergy – which provides electricity to customers in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi – issued a statement saying, “We cannot comment due to an ongoing litigation.”
“We are deeply saddened by the loss of life in our community,” the utility company wrote.
ERCOT officials said they launched emergency blackouts on February 15 after a snowstorm blanketed much of Texas and dropped temperatures to sub-freezing levels. The agency said it had taken drastic measures to prevent a catastrophic statewide blackout.
“Given that around 46% of private generation went offline last Monday morning, we are confident our network operators made the right choice to avoid a statewide blackout,” he said. ERCOT declared in its press release.
But the lawsuit – filed on behalf of Maria Pineda and Cristian Pineda’s estate by lawyer Anthony Buzbee – argues that power was cut for “those who were most vulnerable to the cold”.
“As a result, there were images of empty downtown Houston office buildings with power, but the Pineda mobile home park was left without power,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit accused ERCOT of misleading customers by assuring them that the power outages would be temporary.
Rather, the power outages lasted for days. Failure to adequately inform the complainants of the duration of the power outages prevented them from properly preparing for the power failure or leaving the area. save Cristian Pineda’s young life, “the lawsuit alleged.
The Pinedas have been without power and heat for two days and meanwhile temperatures have dropped as much as 10 degrees in their area, the lawsuit says.
Instead of letting customers, like the Pinedas, know that the power outages would continue, ERCOT sent messages on social media to keep customers from doing laundry on Valentine’s Day and “unplugging new ones.” devices that you purchased during the pandemic and used only once. According to the lawsuit, which included an image of ERCOT’s social media post for Valentine’s Day.
The lawsuit also noted that following a severe winter storm in 2011, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation issued a report informing ERCOT that “additional wintering of power infrastructure in Texas was necessary ”.
Large numbers of units that stumbled offline or failed to start during the 2011 storm demonstrated that “the generators did not sufficiently anticipate the full impact of the prolonged cold and high winds,” according to the report. cited in the lawsuit.
“Although they were aware of the bad weather forecast for at least a week in advance and the system was not prepared for more than a decade, ERCOT and Entergy took no preventative action that would have were able to avoid the crisis and were totally unprepared to deal with the current crisis, ”according to the lawsuit.
Because the ERCOT system does not cross state borders, the agency is not subject to federal regulation or oversight, according to the lawsuit.
The recommendations were voluntary at the time, but will become mandatory at the end of next year. In an interview last week with KTRK, an ERCOT official appeared to suggest that at least some of the recommendations had been followed. “In 2018, it was just as cold, just as windy, and we had very few power plants offline,” ERCOT senior operations manager Dan Woodfin told KTRK. “It turned out that these best practices and what the generators were doing about it were working.”
“Rather than investing in infrastructure to prepare for the known winter storms that would most certainly come and potentially leave vulnerable people without power, suppliers have instead chosen to put profits ahead of people’s well-being, and ERCOT allowed them to do so, ”said the trial states.
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