what nursing home have closed due to damage from hurricane michael in panama city florida
Hospitals Pummeled past Hurricane Michael Scramble to Evacuate Patients
PANAMA CITY, Fla. — Bay Medical Center, a 300-bed hospital in the center of town, was a tumultuous mess. Staff members were frantically working on Thursday to evacuate patients just as new ones showed upwards at the door.
Hurricane Michael had strafed the place, blowing out windows and stripping some of the buildings in the sprawling complex downwardly to their metallic girders. Signage was strewn in the streets. Doctors, nurses and workers wandered outside, some crying, some looking for prison cell service.
The governor had appear that all of the patients in the infirmary were to be evacuated, which was expected to accept 48 hours. And other residents of the ravaged city were still showing up request for medical care but to exist turned away. A man named Wain Hall, 23, was standing with his bicycle, screaming at a security guard by the boarded-up archway to the emergency room.
"I got a busted head, and then you refuse me medical attention here?" he said.
He lifted his ball cap to reveal matted, blood-soaked hair. "I have lost everything and everyone keeps turning us away," he said.
[Follow our live updates on the backwash of Hurricane Michael here]
As Michael bore downwards so passed, some hospitals in the region airtight entirely, and others evacuated their patients, but kept staff in place to run overwhelmed emergency rooms. In Florida, four hospitals and xi nursing facilities were closed, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Panama Metropolis has five hospitals, according to the Florida Health Association. Bay Medical, with 323 beds, and Gulf Coast Regional Medical Heart, with 238, are the biggest.
Florida officials also said food and supplies were being dropped in by air to the country'southward mental hospital in Chattahoochee, which is cutting off by country. The mental infirmary has a section that houses the criminally insane, but the facility itself has non been breached, officials said.
Gov. Nathan Bargain of Georgia said 35 hospitals or nursing homes in that state were without electricity and operating with generators.
Federal health officials said they were moving approximately 400 medical and public health responders into affected areas, including six disaster teams that can set medical operations outdoors. Some were heading to an overwhelmed emergency department in Tallahassee. Other federal medical personnel were being assigned to search-and-rescue teams to triage people who were rescued. University of Florida Wellness Shands Hospital sent ambulances and 4 helicopters to assist in rescue efforts, transporting patients out of Panhandle hospitals.
When a tempest like Michael rapidly intensifies, leaving petty advance warning, it tin be difficult to organize enough specialized medical transportation and patient beds to evacuate people in time, disaster experts said. In previous natural disasters, notoriously Hurricane Katrina, that has left infirmary and nursing habitation patients among the virtually vulnerable. In the wake of Hurricane Irma last twelvemonth, a dozen residents died at a Hollywood, Fla., nursing home when temperatures spiked and the facility lost air conditioning.
When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico final year, generators failed at hospitals and nursing homes during prolonged ability failures, and deaths from chronic illnesses across the population climbed. Patients having medical emergencies at habitation are also vulnerable. Medical personnel failed to reach some patients in time after Hurricane Harvey flooded the Houston area last August.
Paradigm
On Thursday, relatives of patients at hospitals and nursing homes in areas pummeled past Michael scoured social media and hit redial on their phones as they tried to reach facilities that had not evacuated.
"Both phone lines are down," said Olivia Ghafoerkhan, 35, whose female parent is a resident at River Valley Rehabilitation Center in rural Blountstown, Fla., and has a seizure disorder. "I'm just worried, if anything happens, in all the confusion, what if someone forgets to give her the medication?"
And then far, at least six people have died from the storm.
Bay Medical on Th was running with partial electricity from its generators. But there was no water and the toilets were filling upwards. Windows were broken. One worker said that the fourth floor was flooded — peradventure from leaky windows or roof damage. She had tied plastic numberless over her shoes and the legs of her scrubs.
Dr. Brian Roake, the head of the anesthesiology department, was among those who rode out the hurricane in the hospital. "It was like hell," he said.
A number of patients had been moved out before the tempest. But on Wednesday afternoon, the storm began battering the city and the streets all around the hospital, and before long information technology became evident that the hospital buildings themselves were not safe.
Within, Dr. Roake said, the worst situation was in the intensive care unit on the upper floors of a newer glass belfry. The windows there are double-paned, but the outer panes started blowing out and the worry spread fast. There was a rush to move around 40 people — post-eye surgery patients, critically ill septic patients, respiratory failure patients on ventilators — to safer quarters on lower floors in the central part of the edifice. Staff members and nurses had to conduct some patients down stairways, fearing that the elevators had get unsafe, he said.
"Obviously in that location was a lot of emotions, just I call up people held together pretty well and tucked them away for awhile and merely got on with what needed to exist done," Dr. Roake said.
At present comes the process of moving the patients out. "They're in the process of getting them transported to other hospitals — in Pensacola, wherever they tin can accept them," he said.
On Th afternoon, the hospital resorted to Twitter to transport a plea to the Lynn Oasis Police Section, asking it to allow a truck full of food and other supplies through a roadblock. "URGENT," it read, "Lynn Haven, FL constabulary department, please permit the Sysco truck headed to Bay Medical with food and resources through the road block to evangelize these needed supplies to the hospital."
Dr. Lynn Seto was walking outside the hospital in her scrubs Thursday, and broke down in tears when asked about the country of the place. "Information technology's devastating," she said. "We're doing everything nosotros tin can."
The emergency room, she said, had been "inundated with people because people are seeking shelter."
During disasters, some hospitals and nursing homes choose to evacuate some or all of their patients before a storm, recognizing the particular risks for people in poor health of losing power, water and communications. But in the case of Hurricane Michael, leaders of many health centers chose to shelter in place, and they most likely took precautions like boarding upward windows, bringing in extra staff and medications, and connected to operate equally the storm approached.
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Reasons for choosing to stay vary and depend on a range of calculations, from a facility's preparedness to fears that the risks of moving fragile patients could outweigh the benefits in the face of ofttimes uncertain weather predictions.
Most Florida nursing homes in the areas affected by Michael did not evacuate. Several sustained structural damage and began moving patients out later on the storm passed. Still others were facing severe challenges on Th afternoon, according to Kristen Knapp, director of communications for the Florida Health Care Association, which represents most of the land'southward nursing centers. She said problems communicating with facilities and moving the most critical residents to safety were specially serious in Panama City.
Ms. Knapp said the 911 service in one surface area had been downward. "The ambulance and fire-rescue resources are extremely limited," she said. "The problem is that the tempest, information technology came ashore and it never permit upward."
15 911 answering points in Florida and Georgia had to reroute their calls, according to the Federal Communications Committee, and i remained down, making it more difficult for people to seek help.
Ms. Knapp said the land's new generator requirements for nursing homes — established after the nursing dwelling house deaths after Hurricane Irma — were helping, merely that some nursing centers had non been able to install permanent generators in time and had sought extensions.
"They are bringing in mobile generators, portable coolers," she said. "People are doing what they need to do."
Gulf Coast Regional Medical Center said on Thursday that it was evacuating all of its approximately 130 inpatients, starting with the almost critically sick. The hospital, which was running on backup generator power, had sustained roof and window harm from the storm.
Melissa Figlinski, a paralegal who lives in Springfield, spent two nights at Gulf Coast Regional afterward taking shelter there with her 6-year-old daughter, Madelyn. The afternoon of the tempest, they moved to a waiting room near the intensive intendance unit. In a corner, as far as they could get from the window, Ms. Figlinski held on tight to Madelyn, promising her everything would be fine. "Information technology sounded like something was going to crash into the hospital," she said. "All throughout, I was praying we would survive this storm."
Liza Marie Miller, whose 78-year-one-time grandmother is a patient there, said she had been trying for about 24 hours to go data from the hospital about her condition.
Ms. Miller, who lives in Atlanta, said she has been unable to reach her grandmother'south room or any nurses and doctors on her flooring at the hospital. The phones band and band.
"I am starting to get a lilliputian bit more emotional about it," Ms. Miller said in an interview. "You just want to know where they are."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/us/hurricane-michael-hospitals-damage-florida.html
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