“The smell hit me first. Sweet, like barbecue rot, mixed with exhaust and hot asphalt. Dogs were howling in backyards. When I got to our driveway, my mother’s screen door had been baking in the sun all morning.
I was frantic. I didn’t think. I grabbed the iron handle with my bare right hand and threw my weight back to force it open. The metal was hot enough to cook on. It burned through my skin in a second. I didn’t even feel the pain until I was already inside.
It was over a hundred degrees in the hallway. The air tasted like dust and trapped heat. My mother’s oxygen concentrator sat dead in the corner, its backup battery gone. My sister was on the floor beside the bed, delirious from the heat. My mother had already died hours earlier in her sleep, when the machine failed.”
— Chloe Eastland, testifying before the Senate
