Many hospitals close; a few to ride it out

One by one, up and down Florida’s southeastern coast, hospitals are going dark. With the approach of what many meteorologists think will be a historic storm, most hospital administrators and staff have been scrambling in the last day to evacuate patients.

But in advance of Hurricane Irma, several facilities are hunkering down instead. One of them is Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach, which has a sprawling campus of more than 1 million square feet. Though it already has canceled elective surgeries and soon will be turning off electricity in its ancillary buildings, it is bringing in homebound patients so their care is not endangered once Irma hits early Sunday.

Those newcomers will have company. Women who are 35 weeks or more into a pregnancy are being encouraged to come to the hospital “because spontaneous deliveries can happen when the barometric pressure plummets,” noted Mount Sinai CEO Steven Sonenreich. Other than a potentially busy maternity ward, the hospital will be open for emergencies only.

“We want as few people here as possible,” he said. Doctors, nurses and other staff have been reduced to two small teams that will spell each other for the duration “to make sure they’re safe and rested.”

Mercy Hospital in Coconut Grove is now closed, having started the evacuations of more than 200 patients on Wednesday. Further up the coast, Cape Canaveral Hospital, located in Cocoa Beach and on a barrier island, shut down on Friday. Facilities on the state’s western side also were in motion. Palms of Pasadena Hospital in St. Petersburg began moving patients out Friday morning.

The University of Miami Hospital will remain open, according to its website, though all of its 30 outpatient facilities will be shuttered and services, including chemotherapy, radiation and dialysis, discontinued.

Sonenreich said Mount Sinai has weathered past hurricanes, including Andrew in 1992. But Katrina and a series of disastrous weather events caused administrators to re-evaluate their preparedness. The hospital created hurricaneresistant entryways and vestibules, he said, converted its windows to hurricaneresistant glass and added new generators raised many feet above the flood plain.

More remote health-care centers, especially in the Florida Keys, are emptied and shuttered.

“We’ve never closed a facility in the face of a storm before, in probably 50-plus years,” said Wayne Brackin, CEO for Baptist Health South Florida. Irma’s size and ferocity convinced him to do the unthinkable.

“The Keys are so vulnerable, and the storm is such a monster,” he said. “It’s too dangerous to leave people down there.”