Texas hospitals were ready for Harvey
As Hurricane Harvey made landfall, Houston’s hospitals tried to stay safe and operational using submarine doors and elevated power supplies, improvements set in motion more than a decade ago.
Some, like the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Houston facilities, remained closed for outpatients through late last week as they dealt with flooding in and around their buildings.
But others, like Christus Health’s Houston-area facilities, were mostly fine by Aug. 28, two days after HHS Secretary Dr. Tom Price declared a public health emergency in the state, where floodwaters rose throughout the week.
And as Texas and other parts of the Gulf Coast move into recovery mode, the Eastern Seaboard is gearing up for Hurricane Irma, which picked up considerable steam late last week. At deadline, Irma was still several days away from hitting the Caribbean islands and about a week from the U.S., but early forecast models suggest that it will remain a powerful storm.
In 2001, during Tropical Storm Allison, some of Texas Medical Center’s 23 hospitals were devastated, with structural damage and research lost. Texas Medical Center facilities flooded, forcing patients to be evacuated, sometimes in the dark. Essential drugs were damaged or destroyed. Animals in the Baylor College of Medicine’s basement died in floodwaters.
If there was a silver lining, it was that the storm catalyzed a slew of flood protections, including new floodgates, aboveground electrical and water-pump systems, ani- mals kept on higher floors, and, for UT Physicians, battery backups for refrigerators that store important medications (such as tetanus vaccines).
As of Aug. 26 each of Christus Health’s hospitals had a seven-day water supply on hand, and Christus was preparing to distribute the water in Corpus Christi, which had issued a boil order for water.
“We have to ensure that our facilities are better prepared to handle these storms,” Christus CEO Ernie Sadau said. In the past 10 years, the system has focused on strengthening its buildings, installing windows and roofing materials designed to withstand Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, the most powerful storms. Christus had minimal flooding, he said, and didn’t have to close any facilities.
Texas Medical Center—which spent billions on fortifications after Allison— relied on flood doors to keep water out. The organization also tracked rainfall in real time, using a flood alert system put in place as a result of Allison.
But the protections could go only so far: The basement of one of Texas Medical Center’s facilities, Ben Taub Hospital, flooded, damaging its power supply. The hospital attempted an evacuation that was slowed by the water that surrounded the structure.
Memorial Hermann Sugar Land hospital transferred 75 patients to another Memorial Hermann Health System hospital on the evening of Aug. 29 to avoid rising waters of a nearby river.
News of the flooding spread quickly online through videos and text snippets. Unlike during Allison, this time hospitals in Texas had Twitter. Many took to the social media site to tweet updates throughout the weekend— and to stop misinformation, as Houston Methodist did when it corrected a rumor that its Texas Medical Center hospital was flooding.