In an interview posted last week on the State of Reform website, DFW Hospital Council President/CEO Stephen Love discussed the winter storm that devastated most of Texas.

“Texas was hit pretty hard,” said Love. “Some of the hospitals experienced some power problems. Some experienced water problems, and they had problems with people coming to the emergency rooms for non-emergency things like they couldn’t run their oxygen at home. In 2011, North Texas was subjected to rolling blackouts and those were very problematic. So Oncor worked with us, and this time, none of the power was cut off to hospitals. That was a good thing.”

According to Love, hospitals in El Paso fared much better because they were not connected to the independent Texas electrical grid.

“El Paso in 2011, said, ‘We don’t want to go through this ever again,’ and they got off the Texas grid and re-did the infrastructure related to their electrical power,” he said. “They also had their backup power coming from the western grid. So, El Paso did not go through a lot of the problems that many of our hospitals went through last week. When people say ‘all of Texas,’ El Paso, to their credit, took action in 2011 to avoid this.”

You can ready the full interview here.