Oldest Polio Survivor Dies Due to Power Outage

Posted: 5/29/2008 at 07:25 PM

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ATLANTA -- For the first time in more than half a century, the Odell residence is quiet.

There are no squeaks and pops from the electric motor that powered an "iron lung" pumping air in and out of Dianne Odell's body.

A thunderstorm knocked out the power to her home Wednesday, shutting off the massive metal machine that had helped her breathe for nearly 60 years.

It was about 3 a.m. when the electricity went out at Odell's home in Jackson, a small Tennessee town about 90 miles northeast of Memphis. An emergency generator did not start, and Odell died as her father and brother-in-law took turns pumping the iron lung manually.

Dianne Odell, 61, was believed to be the nation's oldest survivor of polio to have spent almost all of her life inside an iron lung.

She had been confined within the 7-foot-long, 750-pound machine ever since she was paralyzed at the age of 3 by bulbospinal polio. That was in 1950, just a few years before a polio vaccine was discovered.