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Weeks after Hurricane Beryl, Black Houston neighborhoods are still recoveringMore than 2.5 million homes, schools and businesses through the Gulf Coast lost power during Hurricane Beryl earlier this summer. The Category 1 hurricane left communities without electricity and fresh food and forced people to live amid rising temperatures. Prism spoke with a Houston resident who shared that, of the 24 storms he’d seen and survived, Beryl caused the most damage to his home.

“This was different because of all the trees that fell. And how windy it was,” he said. “We didn’t get much rain. It’s just a lot of wind. And a lot of trees fell.”

Cooper goes on to share that he and his neighbors have relied on civic club leadership in their mostly Black area for water and food assistance and haven’t seen or heard from the mayor, exposing the failures of local government agencies that have not stepped up and provided relief to Houston residents in need. This account is similar to Houston resident Alvarez Almendariz, a Harvard University Ph.D. candidate studying disaster and colonialism in the Texas Gulf Coast, who, with help from neighbors, powered fans and medical equipment using small power stations loaned by a local disaster recovery nonprofit.

He noticed that power in wealthier and whiter neighborhoods had been restored within days.

Another source who spoke with Prism correctly predicted that the hurricane would spend more time in the Gulf and curve north toward Houston, a city intimately tied to the industries that fuel climate change. Prism has more →

Credit: Ambar Castillo for Epicenter-NYCNursing homes need more oversight. This may include your loved one's facilityEpicenter-NYC’s Ambar Castillo delves into the need for more oversight at nursing homes for patients who have reported mistreatment or neglect while in long-term care facilities in New York. The outlet cites that earlier this year, the attorney general’s office settled an $8.6 million lawsuit with a nursing home in Long Island for fraud and residential mistreatment. The lawsuit alleged that patients at the nursing home suffered from dehydration and malnutrition, were forced to sit in their urine and feces, sustained severe injuries from falls, and developed infections and sepsis as a direct result of improper care.

Queens resident Anisia Ayon who had a knee replacement and went to a nursing home for rehabilitation two years ago told Epicenter-NYC that her post-operative care team failed to bathe her and administer her diabetes medication on time.

“My experience with nursing homes is they need to be more checked [as] [staff]... don’t care, they just go to work.” During her short-term stay at a facility, Ayon said she was forced to bathe herself after 20 days.

Advocates and community leaders quoted in the story say understaffing and lack of oversight are to blame for the facilities' poor quality of care.

“Things have gotten worse for nursing home residents [since the pandemic],” Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, told Epicenter-NYC. “The inspections have been less frequent … so that means that nursing home operators know that they can get away with poor care, with mistreating residents, with discharging residents inappropriately with impunity, because there’s generally little, if any, repercussions for illegal or inappropriate care.”

Read more to learn how some NYC community leaders are responding to this issue and practical advice for checking in on your loved ones →

Credit: Medicine Wheel Ride’s Facebook page

Medicine Wheel Riders travel 2,200+ miles for Missing Murdered Indigenous PeopleFor ten days, Indigenous women throughout the Western U.S. drove a total of 2,211 miles to raise awareness about and honor their missing and murdered loved ones at the annual motorcycle rally, the Medicine Wheel Riders, which ended last Sunday. Beginning at a reservation in Southern California on July 26 and ending at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, the annual rally draws some half a million bikers every year. 

This year, one participant described the motorcycle rally as akin to a “prayer” or journey in which they are being healed. Another rider told Native News Online that riding in a long line with hundreds of bikers behind her on sacred ground brought them “tears and chills.” The annual cause is connected to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) crisis, an epidemic linked to Indigenous people who have been murdered at a rate ten times the national average. The Bureau of Indian Affairs estimates there are 4,200 unsolved MMIP cases, but advocates say that number is likely higher.Hear more stories about the MMIP crisis from riders →

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Dr. Thomas Wyatt is a Shawnee/Quapaw emergency medicine expert, academic leader, and advocate for Native American representation in medicine. Dr. Wyatt is one of the first tribally enrolled American Indians to lead an academic emergency department in the United States – and the first to chair an emergency department in Minnesota → 

Credit: Courtesy of Dr. Wyatt for Native News Online