Senior citizens in the Rio Grande Valley are paying the price for oppressive heat

From Public Health Watch:

This is the second installment in an ongoing series, “Powerless,” from Public Health Watch examining how rising temperatures and skyrocketing electricity costs are placing Texans in danger. This story was produced in partnership with MyRGV.com.

RIO GRANDE CITY — Eighty-year-old Arturo Gómez is used to waking up in a hot house every morning.

He and his wife turn off the air conditioning at 9 p.m. and sleep only with a fan, even during the hottest days of August. They turn it on again at 9 a.m., but  still feel they can’t get a break from the heat.

Even their three dogs suffer.

“If I don’t turn on the A/C, they follow me around with their tongues out, like asking how long we are going to have to endure this,” said Gómez, a retired mechanic living in Rio Grande City.

It’s been two years since Gómez opened the mail to find a $600 electric bill and realized he and his wife had to cut costs. They live on their combined Social Security checks, and the money wasn’t going far enough.

“We either pay the electric bill or we eat,” he recalls saying to his wife.

For elderly people in the Rio Grande Valley, the combined stress of rising heat and electricity costs can be deadly. Over the past 20 years, at-home deaths of people 75 years and older have tripled in the summer months, rising far faster than the 68% increase in the elderly population, according to a Public Health Watch analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the last five years, as electric rates have risen sharply in Texas, at-home deaths of seniors reached the highest they’ve ever been in the summer months in Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr and Willacy counties, except in 2020, when COVID-19 swept across the state.

At-home deaths of seniors in the Rio Grande Valley far out-paced deaths within that age group statewide, which increased 132% at a time the elderly population increased 83%.

The causes of death in these cases were not available, although officials acknowledge that heat-related deaths are often under-reported, and recent studies have shown a correlation between heat waves and excess deaths of all causes.

In most cases, the lack of an air conditioning system is not the problem. The U.S. Census found that 99% of homes in the four-county area of the Valley have some form of A/C.

Many residents simply can’t afford to turn on their units for an extended length of time.

Elderly more at risk

Rene Perez has seen firsthand the danger that heat can pose to the elderly.

As director of patient transport services at the South Texas Emergency Care Foundation, he responded to a 911 call in July 2024 to a sweltering Harlingen home where all the doors and windows were closed.

Inside, he found the bodies of an elderly couple. A family member told him later that the couple tried to avoid turning on the air conditioning because they couldn’t afford it.

“To me that is the sad part,” Perez said, “because that probably shouldn’t have happened.”

The Valley has a higher-than-average concentration of so-called “energy poverty” in the United States, meaning that energy costs are more than 6% of a household’s income, according to a 2024 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

Some areas of the Valley face an energy burden even higher, of 15% or more, or about $500 per month for someone with an annual income of $40,000, according to the study.

Costs, meanwhile, keep going up, even as temperatures continue to rise. The average price of electricity in Texas — in cents per kilowatt hour — has increased about 30% since 2021, and rose 4.4% between June 2025 and June 2026,  according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Average summer temperatures in the Valley are also increasing, ranging from 95 degrees to over 100. Temperatures in McAllen, for example, in Hidalgo County, have increased 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1970s, or 57% more than in the rest of the nation, according to Climate Central. 

The rising temperatures are particularly hard on the elderly. The aging process reduces the body’s ability to cool itself, and older people are more likely to suffer from underlying health conditions such as diabetes and hypertension that make them more susceptible to heat, according to Eric Panzer, medical director at Valley Regional Medical Center’s emergency department.

“They are much more fragile, and they are not able to tolerate it,” Panzer said. “Their bodies don’t have the same ability to compensate as young patients.”

Older adults also spend more time at home and are likely to be on fixed incomes, a combination that can increase their exposure to indoor heat.

A 2020 study in Houston that examined how indoor heat affected people over age 65 found that an increase in the indoor temperature of 9 degrees Fahrenheit made elders 11% more likely to die of heat-related illness.

This population tends to live with “some form of chronic disease,” said the study’s lead author, Cassie O’Lenick, an environmental epidemiologist. “When your internal core body temperature heats up to dangerous levels it impacts a lot of these different organ systems, and so if you have underlying disease, it’s going to exacerbate it.”

Co-author Peter Crank, an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo’s Waterloo Climate Institute in Ontario, Canada, said heat has always been a threat to the elderly, but has become “more common, more intense and longer in terms of its duration.”

Seeking refuge

María Silvia Alanís seeks comfort at her son’s house.

A 70-year-old retired home healthcare aide in Rio Grande City, Alanís lives by herself in a house owned by her son, Jaime, who built it with two of his brothers. The two-bedroom, one-bath house is made of brick and cement, meaning it can take longer to heat up but also takes longer to cool off.

Alanís has two small window units, one in her bedroom and one in her living room, but she never runs both at the same time. With a $570 monthly Social Security check, the $60 to $80 electric bill she receives for using just one unit is more than 10% of her income.

She got help once from an energy assistance program to pay her electric bill, but hasn’t been able to get it again.The last time she tried, she was told the program had used up its allotment of funding for the year, she said.

Her son often asks her to spend the summer afternoons at his house, taking advantage of his wall air-conditioning unit, known as a mini-split.

“At least until the afternoon goes by, I will stay there because it is too hot,” Alanís said. “Once it cools down a little in the evening, I come back.”

‘Severely underfunded’

This year, the high cost of electric bills has turned into the topic of choice in East Alto Bonito, a rural community where Anabel Garza works, east of Rio Grande City.

Garza, a notary public who helps people apply for assistance, estimates that about 70% of her clients have  annual incomes of $12,000 or less. Most of them have built their houses over time with the help of friends or family, so the structures are not properly weatherized to keep out the heat.

She helps people apply for a variety of programs, including the federal Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, known as LIHEAP, which provides money to low-income families that need help with electric bills.

The funding, however, is limited, said Victoria Arredondo, program manager at the Community Action Corporation of South Texas, known as CACOST, the agency that administers the energy assistance program for Cameron, Willacy and Starr counties.

Each state administers its own program, and in Texas, a household is eligible if it does not exceed 150% of the federal poverty guidelines — or $32,460 per year for a family of two.

“There is such a big need in the Rio Grande Valley,” Arredondo said. “We don’t have the funds to help everybody.”

Like Alanis, Arturo Gómez got utility assistance only once. The year he got it, he and his wife were able to turn on the A/C at night and slept better. They  haven’t been able to get help since because of lack of funding.

The money often runs out in Texas before eligible families can receive help.

In Cameron and Willacy counties, for example, about 42,000 households qualify for assistance,  but CACOST was able to help less than 8% — about 3,000 in Cameron County and just 135 in Willacy County in 2025, Arredondo said.

Funding also falls short in Hidalgo County. More than 100,000 families qualify for utility assistance, but the Hidalgo County Community Service Agency receives only enough funds for about 8,000 families, said Jaime Longoria, the agency’s executive director.

Longoria recalls recently speaking with a client in his 70s who said his $500 rent and $360 summer electric bill in themselves surpass the $700 he gets each month from Social Security.

Longoria said the man told him, “By the end of the month, we are surviving from whatever we can get from the food bank.”

Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association in Washington, D.C., said LIHEAP has fixed funding, unlike other key social assistance programs such as the Supplemental Assistance Program, or SNAP, which provides food stamps to all those who qualify. Even SNAP has not been spared from the Trump administration cuts, however, with the number of eligible families being reduced.

“The problem we are facing is that [LIHEAP] is severely underfunded,” Wolfe said, noting that it only has enough money to cover about one in six eligible households.

Residents of hotter states such as Texas are at a further disadvantage. LIHEAP was designed to help with heating costs in winter, so the funds are often depleted by the time hot weather rolls around, according to the MIT study.

“It has effectively not really changed since the 1980s, in terms of how they allocate the money across different states,” said Christopher Roland Knittel, a climate and sustainability professor at MIT and a co-author of the study. “Yet the world has changed a lot since the 1980s.”

In the Valley, families could get anywhere from $1,200 to $1,800 a year for utility costs, but those dollars stretch thin with summer bills in the hundreds of dollars each month.

Arredondo said  applications from residents of Cameron and Willacy counties have spiked in the first half of 2026, meaning the funds will be exhausted even more quickly this year.

“When the funding runs out, the program stops,”  Wolfe said. “When Texas uses its allocation, that’s the end of the program for the year in Texas.”

CACOST also handles the weatherization program for 13 South Texas counties. A weatherized home can save a family around $300 in a year, but, once again, the funding is limited, said Doug Hairgrove, director of the weatherization program and the Community Action Comprehensive Energy Assistance Program at CACOST.

In 2025, CACOST was able to weatherize 293 homes in Cameron, Hidalgo, Starr and Willacy counties, according to data shared with Public Health Watch.

“We could probably do eight times as many if we had the funds and the workforce,” Hairgrove said.

Ongoing struggles

For the elderly in the Rio Grande Valley, the rising energy costs often mean going without air conditioning altogether.

Perez, with the South Texas Emergency Care Foundation, is still troubled by the memory of finding the Harlingen couple dead inside their home more than two years ago.

Perez had their deaths in mind when the foundation started its Community Health Paramedicine program, the first in South Texas, in which paramedics help residents manage their health issues and spot problems before they need emergency care. Among the red flags: people who don’t have A/C or need help paying their electric bill.

For now, Gómez plans to keep using  A/C only during the day, even though he and his wife struggle with health conditions such as hypertension.

They easily meet the definition of “energy poverty”; a recent electric bill of $250 took about 12% of their household income that month. But with no help in sight, they’ll continue to turn off the A/C at night.

Gómez feels they have no other choice.

“Running the A/C 24 hours per day,” he said, “it’s just a bunch of money.”