Power outage and heat-related death at Tucson mobile-home park spark fear among residents

Paul Dacon’s neighbors knew him as a quiet older man who was fastidious about his yard. That’s why, when the weeds started to creep higher and higher outside Dacon’s mobile home, they knew something was wrong.

Only weeks before, their mobile home park on the north side of Tucson — called Hummingbird Harvest — had experienced an 11-day electricity outage from July 14-25. During that time, temperatures soared above 105 degrees.

The outage had sent the small park, made up of about 15 mobile homes near Oracle and Ft. Lowell roads, into crisis: with the sun baking down, the heat inside the mobile homes spiked and residents scrambled to find reprieve.

Dacon, 70 years old, was found dead 13 days later in his mobile home on Aug. 7; the Pima County Medical Examiner noted that “environmental heat exposure” contributed to his death, which was ruled an accident.

Dacon was “found decomposing in his residence without evidence of trauma or indication of suspicious activity,” according to the medical examiner’s report.

The report also noted: “There was no electricity in the residence and no air conditioning.”

Heat experts say that extreme heat is rarely the main factor that kills people, but it can exacerbate other health problems that may be deadly.

July was Tucson’s hottest month on record . Now, the rest of the residents say they fear another season of extreme heat in their mobile homes.

“I’m scared that it will happen again next summer,” 62-year-old Leticia Limon says in Spanish. “Tengo mucho miedo.”

The park manager, in a phone call with Arizona Luminaria, denied Dacon’s death was related to the power outage.

Pima County property records show the park is owned by a limited liability company called T3P LLC . That entity is a real estate company that includes Game Day Holdings LLC and Lakefront Capital Group LLC, according to the Arizona Corporation Commission . All the companies are based in Phoenix.

Julie Hunter, a 51-year-old resident with a young daughter, initially noticed the power go out in July because her mobile home immediately started heating up. “It gets hot in these suckers, fast,” said Hunter. “It’s like a tin can.”

Mobile homes residents are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat. While mobile homes only make up a portion of Arizona’s total housing stock — about 5%, according to researchers at Arizona State University — mobile home residents make up about 40% of indoor heat deaths every year.

In Pima County at least 31 people have died indoors due to heat-related causes in 2024, according to the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner.

Heat deaths for people in manufactured homes are so high because of a mix of old and dilapidated structures , often made of thin metal walls that heat up quickly, and because residents may have low incomes with minimal access to utility assistance to be able to crank up the A/C.

More broadly, the ongoing extreme heat raises questions about who is ultimately responsible for making sure vulnerable people aren’t exposed to extreme heat for long periods. Specific efforts may help people find social workers, offer information about how to best avoid heat stroke, or offer financial support to some households, but without more resources, it remains a patchwork of support.

No power

In the case of power outages like the one that hit the Hummingbird this July, the park’s owner or manager is likely to be the point of contact with the utility companies, leaving residents uncertain about what is being done to turn the power back on.

Just a day into the power outage at the Hummingbird, residents said they were feeling sick, and their dogs and cats were panting as the heat began to climb outside, reaching highs of 106 and 107 degrees.

The manager, via a flurry of text messages and emails shared with Arizona Luminaria, told residents to call the Red Cross, head to a hotel which the park manager arranged, return to the park, and even to please take out their garbage. Not all residents received the messages or had the means to leave.

On the third day of the outage, Hunter contacted the manager to arrange a wellness check on Paul Dacon. Before that check came through, Dacon told another neighbor that he would go to a friend’s house to escape the heat, so the wellness check was canceled, according to Hunter.

“It took money to come and go. Some people couldn’t even do that. They don’t own a vehicle,” said Hunter, shaking her head. On the first days of the outage, she had bought bags of ice and gone door to door handing them out to neighbors. She said she and a neighbor “helped the ones with no cars to get to the hotel. With animals and belongings. It was a mess.”

Many of the residents knew each other well, making coordination a bit easier.

Hunter said she and other neighbors had shared nods, smiles in passing with Paul Dacon for years. “Everyone here was concerned about him and each other,” she said.

As the power outage wore on, Hunter said she and other residents at the hotel hoped Dacon was still at a friend’s house. “The whole time there wasn’t any sign of Paul. His yard wasn’t tidy. We all here began to worry for him. We all hoped that he was still with his friend.”

Residents said they didn’t get enough support in a dangerous situation, and neither did Dacon. Some spent over a week in their powerless mobile homes because they didn’t get messages about the hotel.

“They left us here”

When the power went out at the Hummingbird, residents’ physical health was immediately at risk. Many of them are older people with health difficulties. Many have limited mobility, or no cars.

The day Lynette Curtis, 60, spoke to Arizona Luminaria, she struggled to take the few steps outside her home to sit on her porch. She told Arizona Luminaria she relies on supplemental oxygen to get through the day. Her 76-year-old partner Joe Anders, meanwhile, has stents in his heart and recently had back surgery.

The day they say the power first failed, on July 14, the temperature reached 103 degrees at the height of a cloudy day, according to National Weather Service data.

On July 16 at 7 p.m., more than 24 hours after the power first went out, management reached out to residents to offer a one-night hotel stay, according to emails shared with Arizona Luminaria. The email asked residents to respond to calls or texts so management could make a reservation.

Many of the Hummingbird’s residents ended up at the Day’s Inn on Miracle Mile, partially thanks to Joe and Lynette who not only transported their neighbors, but their neighbors’ dogs and pet birds to the hotel. “I like animals. I made them bring the birds,” Anders said.

Management pointed residents with medical vulnerabilities to the Red Cross Emergency hotline.

“If anyone in the household uses oxygen machine, CPAP machines or any other medical equipment for a health condition please urgently call 1800REDCROSS ( 1800 733 27677),” a July 15 email read. “For tenants who do not fit on this criteria,” the email continued, “we are looking for all possible options to get a solution to this. Thank you for your patience during this time.”

Despite the outreach, residents said they still felt vulnerable and unsupported.

“They gave us no food, no water, no ride to get there,” Anders said. “They didn’t come to us with anything. I had to fight to get anything. I had to fight with them every day to stay at the hotel.”

As the power outage wore on, residents say they were forced to leave the hotel during the day and had to struggle to convince management to allow them another night in the air-conditioned Days Inn.

“It was a nightmare. They kept trying to send us home [from the hotel]. Paul died from it. They left us here, trying to cheap out and not pay for the hotel,” said Lynette Curtis.

Arizona Luminaria attempted to reach the owners of the park multiple times through a phone number and email address on their website, the number on the park’s front sign, as well as stopping by the mailing address on their website, but have received no response.

No emergency response

Leticia Limon said her dog, Tigre, almost died during the outage. “He wasn’t moving,” Limon said in Spanish. “He was really bad.”

She stayed two nights without power, sleeping outside in a chair where it was slightly cooler.

“It was so hot inside, all the food went bad,” Limon said.

Hunter was also thinking about food: she had several frozen hunks of beef in her freezer. She took that meat to the hotel and cooked it in a crockpot to share with the other neighbors at the Day’s Inn. “This meat’s gonna go bad,” Hunter thought. “I cooked a big roast in this crockpot with potatoes, cabbage and carrots.”

The next few days, they pooled together a communal meal from $50 gift cards some residents requested from a nearby church, the St. Vincent de Paul Society Sacred Heart Conference, to shop at Safeway. “None of us had the money to recover the food that was lost,” said Hunter. “The hotel serviced breakfast which was helpful, every day. We all had to go back and forth from the park to the hotel to check on our homes.”

The experience in the Hummingbird shows the ways the lack of official response to extreme heat leaves some of the most vulnerable communities behind. While survivors of a hurricane or flood could get help with lost food or impact to their homes, meager federal support exists for people who lose power amid heat waves.

Jeff Goodell , the author of The Heat Will Kill You First, spoke with Arizona Luminaria about the urgency of taking heat more seriously. “Heat is a predatory force,” Goodell said, adding that “it preys on the most vulnerable people first.”

​​”We don’t even begin to take the risks of extreme heat seriously,” Goodell added. “Compared to floods and things like that, the emergency response apparatus is so much less sophisticated.”

Mobile home owners may own their home but not the land under it. While some mobile home communities have a utility hook-up that goes directly to each unit, others have what is called a “master meter” that serves the whole park. In both cases, the owners of the land or park managers may be the point of contact for utility companies, and responsible for upkeep in the park.

Tucson Electric Power said their records showed a 30-second outage at the Hummingbird on July 14, a day that Tucson experienced a significant monsoon storm, said power company spokesperson Joseph Barrios.

“This extended outage wasn’t a TEP outage, it was an outage of equipment owned and operated by the mobile home community,” said Barrios. “TEP was prepared to reenergize service to the community but we could not safely do so until the customer completed repairs and then an inspection clearance was provided.”

Heat resilience

Both Pima County and the city of Tucson have, for the first time this year, established heat plans created to address the crisis of extreme heat.

Tucson’s heat roadmap, the first action plan of its kind for the city, identifies the need to help residents better cool their homes and aims to support heat resilience in low-income communities, say city officials. City officials say a recent policy change to the homeowner rehabilitation program, which helps low-income homeowners with repairs, could help mobile home owners install air conditioning systems and better insulate their homes.

The Pima County Health Department has a new office to address the health impacts of climate, called the Office of Climate and Environmental Health Justice.

The county runs a webpage with information about heat-related illness, prevention strategies, and a map of cooling center locations, but doesn’t have much in the way of additional resources for on-the-ground heat support, said Kat Davis, director of the office. “No general funds or additional grant funds have been identified to augment heat operations, including with extra staff,” Davis said.

The county and city both work with volunteer groups and nonprofits to do canvassing in vulnerable areas. That focus includes senior home parks, said Julie Robinson, who is the program officer of the health department’s Office of Climate and Environmental Health Justice.

On the ground, volunteers donate their time to the Red Cross to visit mobile home parks that have seen a high number of 911 calls. This is the first time the organization, which sees their work as emergency and disaster response, has addressed extreme heat through a targeted campaign, said Courtney Slanaker, executive director for the Red Cross Southern Arizona chapter.

This summer, they visited nine different mobile home parks. In total, Red Cross volunteers left 27,000 heat-related door hangers from the beginning of June to the end of August.

“Heat is an invisible killer and nobody is immune from heat,” said Slanaker. While knowing your neighbors is key to staying safe, she encouraged anyone feeling in acute crisis due to overheating to call an ambulance. “Heat emergencies are serious — call 911.”

DeAnna Mireau, president of the Arizona Association of Manufactured, RV and Park Model Home Owners, sighs heavily when she learns of the death at the Hummingbird. She says about 80% of mobile home residents in Arizona are seniors, making them doubly vulnerable to heat due to age and isolation.

“What can we do to help those people before they get to that point?” asks Mireau, who lives in a mobile home park in the Phoenix area. She says close-knit communities are important as neighbors can help look out for more vulnerable residents. “We have to be proactive. It’s a challenge, and it’s heartbreaking.”

Aftermath

On July 25, the Hummingbird’s property manager emailed residents to ask them to return home “to do a power check.”

After 11 days, the power had been restored.

Today, residents are trying to piece their lives back together.

Julie Hunter, who deals with mobility issues, can’t forget the neglect she felt. “Just about everyone in here is on a fixed income. I am on disability myself.”

“They didn’t even bother to check in on me,” she says of the owner of the park. “If it wasn’t for the people in this park working together, helping each other things could [have] been way worse.”

Joe Anders and Lynette Curtis are still puzzling over an electricity bill that is more expensive than average, even though their power was out for 11 days.

“They offered us nothing but a bigger electric bill,” Anders said.

The city is also waiting to hear whether Tucson will be awarded a federal grant that would help replace dilapidated mobile home units so their owners can survive the extremes of the Sonoran desert climate.

The area where the Hummingbird is located is considered “above average” in heat-related 911 calls , according to a city of Tucson analysis of data from between 2017 and 2023.

Anders, who has been living in the park for 15 years, says it’s the first time he hasn’t had Paul Dacon as a neighbor. “Paul has been here as long as I can remember him,” he said.

Neither the medical examiner nor Arizona Luminaria could find any family for Dacon. The medical examiner discovered that he was a veteran and thus eligible for the Missing in America Project , which locates, identifies and inters unclaimed remains of American veterans.

Dacon’s remains are currently at the Marana Mortuary & Cemetery and will be part of a memorial service held there Oct 5.

Today, Dacon’s mobile home stands empty. It’s the first home visitors see when they turn off the road and into the Hummingbird. Around it, several acacia trees and a tall pine quietly sway in the wind.

As the weather slowly cools, his neighbors feel the loss.

“No letters, no apologies, no help with replacing the food and what little money we had.” said Hunter. “And nothing said to any of us about the loss of Paul. … That could of been any of us.”

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