The latest news today out of Florida:
A 12th patient evacuated from a sweltering Florida nursing home in the wake of Hurricane Irma has died, state officials said Friday as Gov. Rick Scott met with President Donald Trump on recovery efforts.
The Hollywood Police Department said Dolores Biamonte, 57, died Thursday night, more than two weeks after she was evacuated from the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills along with other patients. Eight people died at the facility after it lost power to its air conditioning system. Others died after being evacuated to Memorial Regional Hospital across the street.
The medical examiner's office said that because Biamonte's symptoms were similar to the other patients who had died, she's being included in the death toll from the incident. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement was investigating what led to the deaths.
Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration on Sept. 20 said it suspended the nursing home's license. A week earlier, it stopped the facility from admitting new patients.
Also on Friday, Florida Gov. Rick Scott traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Donald Trump to talk about recovery efforts from Hurricane Irma. Along with Vice President Mike Pence, they also talked about Scott's trip to Puerto Rico, which was ravaged by Hurricane Maria.
Here’s a little more info:
CBS Miami found that employees of the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills left four voicemails on Scott’s personal cellphone in the 36 hours before the first death, when the facility’s air conditioning system had lost power. The governor’s office on Sunday said those voicemails—and any evidence they might have provided for the ongoing investigation into the 11 deaths—have been deleted.
The exact nature of the calls, however, is in dispute. The home’s administrators claim the calls were distress calls. Scott’s office maintains they didn’t express a need for emergency assistance, and it told reporters that someone from the state Department of Health returned the calls and that state officials told the nursing home to call 911 if any of the residents were in need of emergency help.
The reporting has complicated the story of the nursing home, which is under a criminal investigation after it was found that the home had a history of safety violations and failed to meet requirements related to its backup power sources.
The Miami Herald reported that Scott's office said the voicemails were “transitory messages,” which under Florida state law can be deleted once they “lose administrative value.” A spokeswoman for the governor said that the voicemails “were not retained because the information from each voicemail was collected by the governor’s staff and given to the proper agency for handling.”
Before the hurricane, Scott had held conference calls dealing with hurricane preparation. During the calls, he gave out his personal cellphone number and told the health care centers they could call him if they experienced trouble.
Recent reporting also found records that indicated the nursing home staff might have made misleading entries into medical records by waiting hours after a nurse visited the patients. “The facility also entered late entries into the medical records claiming safe temperatures for patients while those same patients were across the street dying in the emergency room with temperatures of over 108 degrees Fahrenheit,” Justin Senior, the secretary of the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, said in a release.
But what Scott’s office did may have broken the law:
Florida's governor may have broken the state's famously liberal public records laws by deleting several pleas for help from a nursing home where 11 died due to a power outage after Hurricane Irma.
Gov. Rick Scott had given out his personal cellphone number to emergency responders and officials at the Hollywood Hills facility before the massive storm hit. In the midst of the crisis, officials left four voicemails on that phone—messages the Republican governor later deleted in possible violation of state "Sunshine Law."
"The whole point of our records laws is to allow us to oversee our governor and hold him accountable," said Barbara Petersen, president of the First Amendment Foundation. "We don't have this oversight and accountability because the records have been destroyed."
The law requires public documents to preserved, but Scott's office focused on a part of a policy that allows certain voicemail messages to be deleted if they only hold “short-term” value and are categorized as a “transitory message," according to the Miami Herald.
But critics said Scott should have followed the broader guideline that voice messages must be kept until “obsolete, superseded or administrative value is lost”—something that might not apply in this scenario, as a criminal investigation is still under way.
The calls were made after the nursing home, located 20 miles north of Miami, lost power to its air-conditioning after the hurricane, creating a hotbox for aging residents, 11 of which eventually died. The nursing home pleaded for help as the sweltering conditions worsened. They also called the electric company and other officials for help but did not evacuate patients or call 911 until it was too late.
Scott right now is enjoying a slight bump from his handling of Hurricane Irma:
A new poll shows Gov. Rick Scott with a slight edge on U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., as Floridians gets ready for what is expected to be a high profile and tight Senate race next year.
St. Leo University released a poll on Friday showing Scott pulling 35 percent with Nelson right behind him at 33 percent. But, with more than a year until the general election, 21 percent of voters are undecided while 11 percent back other candidates.
Most polls have shown a close race between two candidates who are familiar to Florida voters. Scott is closing out his second term in Tallahassee while Nelson is at the end of his third term in the Senate. Earlier this week, the Florida Chamber of Commerce released a poll which showed Scott taking 47 percent with Nelson pulling 45 percent.
The St. Leo poll has Scott moving in the right direction. Back in March, Nelson had a 39 percent to 34 percent over the Republican governor. In March, Scott was seen as favorable by 56 percent of voters and unfavorable by 39 percent of them. In the new poll, 62 percent of those surveyed see Scott in a favorable light while 30 percent view him unfavorably.
But U.S. Senator Bill Nelson (D. FL) isn’t letting Scott off the hook:
Sen. Bill Nelson for the second time invoked the tragic deaths at a South Florida nursing home and jabbed at Gov. Rick Scott over the phone calls the facility made to him.
Speaking on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Nelson called it the “tragedy of all tragedies, 11 frail, elderly seniors died in a hotbox that was a nursing home that had lost power and the generators that were required under existing law, existing regulations of the state of Florida, the generators were for putting back on the lights. They weren’t the generators sufficient in order to run the air conditioning systems. And 11 senior citizens perished.
“And that was after a number of calls that had been made to the governor’s cell phone and calls that were made to Florida Power and Light. And there is a criminal investigation that is under way that will answer some of the questions of why, as they pled for help to come and to get back on the power, why were those never answered and as a result 11 people have died?”
“Something like that just simply shouldn’t happen in America, a country that has the resources and the compassion that our people have,” Nelson said.
Neither is one of Scott’s potential successors:
Former U.S. Rep. and candidate for governor Gwen Graham announced Friday she is filing a public records request for information about Gov. Rick Scott’s cell phone communications during and after Hurricane Irma.
Of particular interest to Graham are voice mails left on Scott’s cell phone from administrators in the Hollywood nursing home that overheated, resulting in the deaths of 12 patients.
Earlier this week it was reported that Scott deleted the voice mails. Scott has said that the calls were quickly redirected to the proper state agencies and returned.
“Why would they have deleted voicemails in the middle of a crisis? These weren’t transitory scheduling requests. These were Floridians asking for help in a crisis,” Graham said in a release. “I won’t take Governor Rick Scott’s word for it. The people of Florida deserve to hear these voicemails — they deserve to hear the truth. ”
By the way, let’s see how this plays out:
Gov. Rick Scott on Tuesday announced the abrupt departure of the head of the state Department of Emergency Management, Bryan Koon, and replaced him with Scott’s former campaign aide and Republican Party of Florida operative, Wes Maul, who has just over a year of emergency operations experience.
Koon, 45, the former director of emergency management at Walmart stores who helped shepherd the agency through the most ferocious storm to hit Florida in a decade, came to work for the state in 2011. He told the governor on Sept. 1 he would resign before the end of the hurricane season "to pursue an opportunity in the private sector,'' said McKinley Lewis, Scott spokesman.
The governor asked Koon to stay until Oct. 1 and he agreed, Lewis said. Maul, 29, will be promoted from chief of staff to interim director.
And Nelson is also hammering Trump hard on this:
The situation in Hurricane Maria-ravaged Puerto Rico is so bleak that the military response needs to shift from talk to all-out action today or “drastic measures” will have to be taken, Florida’s Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson declared in Orlando Wednesday.
“This is a disaster of gargantuan proportions,” Nelson said.
Speaking at the Acacia Puerto Rican Center in Orlando, and surrounded by numerous local Central Florida Puerto Rican community and political leaders, Democrats, Republicans and independents, Nelson lashed out at President Donald Trump‘s response as far too slow, combined with “happy talk … it’s just not realistic.”
Military involvement in the relief efforts began ramping up Thursday with the appointment of Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan to take command of operations, and Trump also announced a temporary suspension of the Jones Act, a 1920 maritime law that limits shipments of goods to the island.
Nelson and several others speaking at Acacia Friday including Florida state Sen. Victor Torres, charged that Trump finally began acting due to strong, angry, and growing pressure. Now, Nelson said, the actual efforts must turn dramatically immediately, and he and others contended that only the military has the logistical experience, training, equipment, and manpower to tackle the problems of impassable roads, no power, no running water and no communication across mountainous terrain.
“If we do not see this changing in the next day, and today, then drastic measures are going to have to be taken,” Nelson said. “But I do believe there has been enough agitation expressed to the administration, and to the White House, and to the Defense Department, and to the National Security Council, and to the FAA, and to the Department of Homeland Security. I think there’s been enough agitation including from this senator and my colleague Sen. [Marco] Rubio that we will see action starting right now.”
Nelson repeatedly said that he and Rubio are of one mind on what is happening in Puerto Rico and what needs to be done.
The consequences are that people already are dying inland from lack of food, water and other essentials, others said.
We can’t let Scott dupe the voters into another major office. Click below to donate and get involved with Nelson and Graham’s campaigns:
Bill Nelson
Gwen Graham