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Home Depot North Loop Houston
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Alex and Carolina Cisneros had alone by the Home Depot to watch a tile-laying affirmation Saturday back they came beyond a affectation touting chargeless air conditioners to advice the aged poor exhausted the calefaction in Houston.
The Cisneroses were interested. They bound active up, acquisitive they qualified. Although they accept one window assemblage in their active room, they said, it's aloof not abundant to air-conditioned their abode in the airless summer heat.
"It's like back you are alfresco and you've got no air conditioning," said Carolina Cisneros, whose bedmate afresh retired. "You aloof accept to get acclimated to it, and it's adamantine because you can't absolutely beddy-bye at night."
The Calefaction Relief Project, in its fifth year, provides federal government allotment to buy air conditioners for low-income aged homeowners and raises clandestine donations to advice added families in need, such as those with respiratory problems.
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"We apprehend Houston is hot," said U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, the project's leader, at a account appointment in advanced of the Home Depot on the North Loop. "But it is alike hotter back you alive in an earlier home with no adeptness of circulation."
At United Way, David Jobe, administrator of advice and barometer services, said the agents will booty calls and awning applicants. To authorize beneath federal guidelines, a being charge be over 62 or accept a abiding disability, and acquire no added than $21,350 a year if distinct or no added than $24,440 if active in a two-person household.
Jobe said that about 1,500 bodies alleged about the air conditioners aftermost year but alone 225 qualified.
Jackson Lee said that about 175 homeowners aftermost year accustomed the chargeless units. This year, she said, the ambition is to accommodate added than 200.
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Joe Zepeda with the Tejano Learning Center said that some acceptance in the center's air conditioning classes accept volunteered to advice install the units.
"We get calls consistently from bodies that are in absolute acute straits," said Zepeda.
Capt. Carl Moore, a paramedic with the Houston Fire Department, said that this time of the year is abnormally demanding for seniors who accept bloom problems.
"Every year, we accept a cardinal of heat-related deaths in Houston, and we see it's consistently targeted on the the actual old and the actual adolescent and those with bloom problems," he said.
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Heat was abhorrent for the afterlife of a 78-year-old Harris County man in June, and the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office is investigating seven added deaths that are possibly affiliated to the weather.
"Lately it's been so boiling outside, and actually, the clamminess has been added of a adventure than the heat," said astrologer Patrick Blood. "If you've been alfresco the aftermost few days, it has aloof been oppressive. A temperature of 90 degrees in this clamminess makes it feel so abundant hotter."
Kathy Barton, backer for the burghal of Houston's bloom department, said bodies should seek air conditioning back there is a calefaction advisory. She said that bodies who don't accept an air conditioner should appointment accompany or ancestors who do.
And, she said, bodies who authorize should try to booty advantage of the action for a chargeless air conditioner.
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"It is a abashment that anyone in Houston would die for appetite of an air conditioner," said Barton.
melanie.markley@chron.com
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