The Florida nursing home where eight patients died days after Hurricane Irma knocked out its air conditioning says it contacted a special number cell phone number Gov. Rick Scott had given them 36 hours before the first death asking for assistance, CBS Miami reports.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s office issued a statement to CBS Miami’s Jim DeFede saying all calls to the hotline were returned in a timely fashion.
“Every call made to the Governor from facility management was referred to the Agency for Health Care Administration and the Florida Department of Health and quickly returned.” said Scott’s communications director John Tupps.
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Mayor Josh Levy of Hollywood, Florida, joins “CBS This Morning” to discuss the investigation into the eight deaths at the Rehabilitation Center a…
CBS News’ Jonathan Vigliotti reported Thursday that records show several 911 calls came from the center starting at 3:30 a.m. But it was nurse Judy From, at a hospital just across the street, who walked over with colleagues to find out for herself what was happening.
“It was a situation where we knew we had to get those patients evacuated,” From told Vigliotti.
The Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills says it lost power during Irma, but utility company Florida Power Light issued a statement to CBS Miami on Friday saying part of the facility had electricity.
“What we know now is that a portion of the facility did, in fact, have power, that there was a hospital with power across the parking lot from this facility and that the nursing home was required to have a permanently installed, operational generator,” said FPL’s Peter Robbins in a statement.
The Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills is seen in Hollywood, north of Miami, on September 13, 2017
The eight people are believed to have died from heat-related injuries. Workers at the Rehabilitation Center of Hollywood Hills said Irma caused the air conditioning to fail Sunday and they struggled to keep residents cool with fans, cold towels and ice, CBS Miami reports.
In a separate statement, the Florida Department of Health’s Mara Gambineri wrote “this facility is located across the street from one of Florida’s largest hospitals, which never lost power and had fully operating facilities. It is 100 percent the responsibility of health care professionals to preserve life by acting in the best interest of the health and well-being of their patients.”
Police have launched a criminal investigation.
Scott announced Thursday the Center will no longer receive state Medicaid funds. Scott said the state has had multiple points of contact with the facility before the Wednesday’s deaths. He said at no time did the facility communicate any imminent threats to its patients.
Several other nursing homes were evacuated because of a lack of power or air conditioning.
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A monitor displays Equifax Inc. signage on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Friday. (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg News)
A week after Equifax disclosed it suffered a massive data breach that may have compromised sensitive information belonging to 143 million people, the credit reporting agency’s chief information officer, David Webb, and chief security officer, Susan Mauldin, are retiring, effective immediately, the company said in a statement Friday evening.
The sudden departures come as Equifax has been the target of intense criticism over the lapses in security that led to the hack and the way the company has handled the aftermath.
Richard F. Smith, Equifax’s chief executive, apologized for the breach in an op-ed published by USA Today earlier this week. “This is the most humbling moment in our 118-year history,” he said. But his promises to make changes at the company were not enough for many alarmed lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
At least two congressional hearings on the Equifax breach have been announced. The first scheduled panel will take place on Oct. 3, when Smith is expected to testify. A bipartisan group of 36 senators have asked the Justice Department and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate reports Equifax executives sold stock after learning about the breach but before it was made public. The Federal Trade Commission took the unusual step of announcing it is conducting a probe into the Equifax breach.
A major frustration for consumers who’ve sought to protect themselves from the Equifax data breach has been having to pay for freezing and unfreezing their credit, as a precaution against fraud. On Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and a dozen other Democrats introduced a bill that would ban credit reporting bureaus such as Equifax, Experian and TransUnion from charging consumers for the service.
Equifax said in its statement the company would offer free security freezes through Nov. 21.
But that is unlikely to satisfy the demands of some elected officials.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on Thursday the company’s chief executive and board of directors should step down unless they take five steps to correct their mishandling: notify affected consumers; provide free credit monitoring to them for at least 10 years, offer to freeze their credit for up to 10 years; remove forced arbitration clauses from their terms of use; and comply with fines or new standards that come out of investigations.
“It’s only right that the CEO and board step down if they can’t reach this modicum of corporate decency by next week,” he said.
