Hurricane Harvey Closes Houston Hospitals, Lessons From Katrina

HOUSTON, TX — Eager to avoid the same catastrophes involving the medically vulnerable in New Orleans a dozen years ago, Houston hospitals are emptying out as Hurricane Harvey’s floodwaters churn around them. Hospital decision-makers are applying the lessons from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, where a doctor and two nurses were accused, but never charged, of bringing on the premature deaths of four patients who were among dozens of hospital and nursing home patients who perished in the epic storm.

Floodwaters swamped the basement of Ben Taub General Hospital, one of only two comprehensive, Level 1 trauma centers in Houston. The hospital’s food, pharmacy and central distribution operations were disrupted.

The immediate focus of evacuation is 18 or so patients who need ventilator support before finding accommodations for another 350 patients. (For more hurricane news or local news from Houston, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Houston Patch, and click here to find your local Texas Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

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“We will work through those patients from the most critical to the least critical,” hospital spokesman Bryan McLeod told ABC News, adding the hospital evacuation will likely take several days.

Bayshore Medical Center, also surrounded by rising floodwaters, said Sunday it was suspending all of its services, including its 24-hour emergency medical center, and moving 196 patients to nearby hospitals. Clear Lake Regional Medical Center, Conroe Medical Center, Houston Northwest Medical Center, Kingwood Medical Center, Mainland Medical Center, Pearland Medical Center, Tomball Regional Medical Center and West Houston Medical Center are all receiving the patients.

Texas Medical Center, the world’s largest hospital and home to Texas Children’s Hospital, Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center and TIRR Memorial Hermann Hospital, closed its flood gates, massive “submarine” doors added as part of an upgrade in 2001 after Tropical Storm Allison knocked out power systems, flooded decades of medical research, forced patient evacuations.Tens of thousands of laboratory animals drowned in the catastrophe.

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center said on Twitter it planned to ride out the storm.

Those major medical facilities are among about 10 hospitals and nursing homes, some of them in rural communities, that have been evacuated since Hurricane Harvey made landfall as a Category 4 storm.

Darrell Pile, the chief executive of the Southeast Regional Advisory Council that is coordinating some evacuations, told The New York Times that while some hospitals and nursing homes moved patients before Harvey hit, others weren’t prepared for the level of chaos that would ensue in the unprecedented rainfall and flood event.

Pile told The Times staff at medical facilities and nursing homes went through mock drills to plan for the disaster, “but honestly, not at this epic level.”

More hospitals could close in the coming days, according to the Catastrophic Medical Operations Center, which coordinates all hospital evacuations in the area.

Tropical Storm Harvey oozed back into the Gulf of Mexico to regroup an is expected to make landfall again sometime Tuesday. The Hurricane Harvey death toll is at least eight people, officials said Monday afternoon, and the city is entirely under water after a catastrophic, 40 inches of rain since Harvey made landfall Fridayevening as a Category 4 storm. By the time Harvey winds down for good, more than 50 inches of rain may have fallen — which is about what Houston normally receive over an entire year.

In 2005, a New Orleans grand jury refused to return indictments against the the doctor and nurses accused of giving a lethal dose of drugs to end the suffering of some patients trapped in a fetid hospital with no electricity and no running water.

Katrina changed how medical facilities respond in catastrophic situations. Three years later, during Hurricane Gustav, new protocols were followed. Houston is borrowing from those lessons.

“The lesson learned last time is, don't have lot of patients in your hospital unless it is absolutely necessary, and don't have too many staff,” Bob Lynch, the CEO of Tulane Medical Center, told CNN in 2008.

Houston is a sea of human misery after epic, unprecedented rains turned the city of 2.5 million into a rising swamp. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images News/Getty Images)