"Deadly"? Who died?
#3 | POSTED BY REDIAL
Deadly doesn't mean anyone died. Much like a deadly virus doesn't mean anyone died, only that in the past power outages in the cold weather, people have died.
English really isn't your thing is it?
For instance:
Today, I spent two hours at the Knig senior living facility in Berlin-Nikolassee and spoke with people on the ground there. The situation was absolutely dire: For four days, 84 residents"including numerous palliative care patients and seniors with care levels 4 and 5, as well as many people with dementia"have been enduring 16 degrees Celsius room temperatures. In the meantime, a resident with dementia wandered out into the cold and had to be retrieved. The electricity is just barely sufficient to brew coffee and heat the rooms"and only because the facility itself has procured a generator. Without it, the situation would be even more catastrophic.
I was told that staff have been in continuous emergency mode since Saturday morning at 6:00 a.m., day and night. The employees are working with flashlights around their necks and sometimes have to carry residents because the elevator is out of service. No emergency call system, no lights in the hallways. The residents were sometimes sitting at the table in the evenings by candlelight.
Meanwhile, the staff is managing the impossible: Electric beds can't be adjusted, so caregivers have to reposition residents using their own physical strength. Feeding pumps were taken home by employees to charge them and brought back the next day. For days, the team has been driving into the city to wash laundry at a laundromat. The small generator from the THW, which arrived on Sunday, has to be refueled with gasoline every two hours in subzero temperatures out in the garden.
On top of that, I was told that communication between the fire department, THW, and the politicians is completely dysfunctional. No one knows which connection point in the power grid the facility is hooked up to. Calls for help went unanswered for several days until evacuation was threatened. The facility held out under its own power for four days without receiving any assistance, sometimes with sleepless nights. There's a lack of prioritization, and the problem keeps getting passed up to the next level"without anything actually getting done in the end.
In fact, Governing Mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) said that care had been taken to ensure all 74 nursing homes in the affected area were supplied with power. Wegner is right in the sense that the nursing home in Nikolassee did have electricity. But it's generated from emergency generators, it's just barely enough, and the overall situation is an absolute outrage for everyone involved. At least today, after four days, THW relief workers arrived and provided at least some relief. But still: absolutely shocking conditions, and this among those for whom our society is supposed to provide priority care.
x.com