Worrying About Blackouts at the Last Stop for Senior Citizens

“One more time,” the pianist shouts, and the two dozen old folks chime in again. “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love . . .

“Let me hear you whisper . . . “

An elderly man and woman stand up and dance slowly in front of the piano. They’re staffers.

It’s midafternoon in a nursing home--Casa Coloma Health Care Center, 10 miles east of Sacramento--and this is the daily sing-along. The residents sit neatly in two rows, mostly in wheelchairs. Some smile. Some have blank looks.

These are among the more sprightly people at Casa Coloma. In the halls, some sit glassy-eyed, making little eye contact. Heads rest on a hand or their chests. The only mobility is a wheelchair, except for the few able to shuffle about.

Others stay back in their rooms, too frail to venture out. Some are attached to a 24-hour feeding device, a tube inserted into their stomachs.

If you’ve ever been here--to any nursing home--you don’t need a description. If you haven’t, chances are you will be before you’re through. If not as a resident, at least as a frequent visitor to a family member.

One-third of us will spend some time living in a nursing home, according to the California Assn. of Health Facilities. An estimated 160,000 currently reside in one of California’s 1,200 “skilled nursing” facilities.

“This is the last stop” for most, notes Deborah Portela, owner-administrator of Casa Coloma. “We’re providing comfort care. But that will be hard to do when their rooms are 90 degrees.”

“One more time . . .

“Keep the love light shining in your eyes . . . “

It’s the threat of not keeping the lightbulb shining that concerns Portela.

Hospitals have been exempted from rolling blackouts, but nursing homes have not. “They’re not hospitals,” notes state Public Utilities Commissioner Carl Wood, who is in charge of drafting the PUC’s blackout exemption policy. “Nursing homes don’t have acute care.”

Try telling that to Pierce Powers, 83, who drives every day from Single Springs in the Sierra foothills to be with his wife, Dinzel, at sing-along. She has dementia. “To me it’s a hospital,” he says. “Residents need the light. It’d be terrible for some of them.”

Portela points out that people afflicted with dementia and Alzheimer’s become used to familiar routines. They get confused and scared when something unusual happens--like the power going off.

One example: Moments later, an Alzheimer’s patient began crying when she saw Portela talking with me and another stranger near her wheelchair. “She thought something was going to happen to her,” explains Portela, who grew up with the family-owned nursing home.

Portela worries mostly about losing air conditioning when the Central Valley fries.

“If we’re off between noon and 3 o’clock, we’re never going to get cool again,” she says. “People with respiratory problems aren’t going to do well . . .

“It seems like they always overlook the elderly. Why would they do this?”

The answer’s not that simple, Commissioner Wood says.

Most nursing homes are in residential neighborhoods. To exempt one facility from blackouts would require exempting thousands of other customers on the same circuit. About half the state already is exempt--hospitals, police stations, prisons . . .

The PUC wants to keep the exemptions at fewer than 60% of total customers. Other businesses--amusement parks, medical labs, restaurants--also are applying for exemptions. The PUC will consider them Aug. 2. Of course, by then half the summer will be gone. “The alternative is to make precipitous decisions,” Wood says.

He notes that nursing homes are required to have backup generators and stresses: “You have to consider what is actually liable to happen in blackouts.”

Portela says phones, fire alarms, bedside call lights and maybe 20% of hall lighting will work. But gates and alarms designed to keep Alzheimer’s patients inside will fail. So will room lights, possibly feeding tubes and all cooling. And no sing-along.

So exempt the old folks. If it requires also exempting the neighbors, so be it. That’s their reward for not being anti-nursing home NIMBYs.

The rest of us can put up with longer blackouts. The way things are going, they may not be needed anyway.

Come on, these are just the people government is supposed to protect. Frail. Dependent. Frightened.

They’re the survivors who deserve at least minimal comfort. Treat them right and maybe they’ll be singing to all of us. But right now, we’re hardly being sweethearts.