HARVEY, La. — On this hot spring day, the temperature is nearing the mid-90s in the city of Harvey. Luckily, the power is on at both West Jefferson Health Care and Maison De’ville Nursing Home. If it wasn’t, it’s possible the residents inside would not have air conditioning.

Two Jefferson Parish nursing homes do not have generators set up to keep the AC running incase of a power outage. An inconvenience for some that could be deadly for nursing home residents.

The news comes less than a year after 12 people at a Florida nursing home died during power outages in the days after Hurricane Irma. It was this kind of incident that moved Jefferson Parish Emergency Management to look into the 13 nursing homes in the parish.

“What we found was that 11 were in total compliance and two have a significant amount of power for life saving equipment, but not for air conditioning,” said Joe Valiente, the director of the Jefferson Parish Department of Emergency Management.

Not having the generator to run the air conditioning is not illegal and emergency and transportation plans for the homes were deemed adequate by the state fire marshal, according to Michael McAuliffe with the Harvey Volunteer Fire Company. But given what happened in Florida, we reached out to Bob Dean whose company, Louisiana Healthcare Consultants, owns both homes, to see what was preventing the company from having the added generator. We never heard back from him or the Louisiana Nursing Home Association.

Not having the extra generator for air conditioning. is by no means an ideal situation, but Valiente says if the conditions inside of these nursing homes takes a turn for the worse, they are prepared.

“We have two volunteer fire departments that cover Harvey so they are notified, they are on standby and they conduct regular checks in the event that the power grid goes out,” Valiente said.

U.S. News and World report gave West Jefferson Healthcare Center an “average” rating and the Maison De’ville a “poor” rating, but Valiente maintains residents should not worry because he says if need be the parish has the resources to move residents to a safe place with air conditioning.