Sanford hospital at risk of flooding if Cat. 1 hurricane hits, study suggests

HCA Florida Lake Monroe Hospital is at risk of flooding if another hurricane hits Central Florida, according to a Harvard study.

The study, published in GeoHealth on Sep. 29, looked at acute care hospitals in 78 metro areas on the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf Coast within 10 miles of the ocean or rivers that lead to the ocean, like Lake Monroe, part of the St. Johns River system.

There were three hospitals that fit that category in Metro Orlando, which includes Orange, Seminole, Lake and Osceola counties: The Lake Monroe hospital, in downtown Sanford; Oviedo Medical Center, in Oviedo; and Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital, in Longwood.

The Lake Monroe facility was the only hospital at risk of being flooded by storm surge during a Category 1 hurricane. Oviedo Medical Center is at risk of being flooded by storm surge during a Category 4. South Seminole was not identified as at risk, though the model does not account for flooding from rain.

The study focused on the threat of Category 2 storms but found HCA Florida Lake Monroe Hospital is at risk of becoming inundated even by Category 1 storm surge, said Aaron Bernstein, senior author and interim director of The Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“Climate change shows us in the most painful way, what needs to be fixed in our society, and that very much includes health care,” Bernstein said.

This threat was clear after Hurricane Ian, when knee-high water flooded one side of the hospital’s parking lot. Fortunately, the building remained dry and accessible and patient care was not interrupted.

HCA Healthcare spokesperson Trip Farmer said the hospital’s electrical equipment is located on the outside of the flood plain and the hospital would evacuate if predicted impacts of severe weather would disrupt services.

Trey Abshier, CEO of HCA Florida Lake Monroe Hospital, said he was confident in the hospital’s ability to adapt to flooding.

“For more than 50 years, HCA Healthcare has been preparing for, responding to and learning from various emergency scenarios and extreme weather events like hurricanes,” Abshier said in a statement. “We know how critical it is to maintain continuity of care across facilities, ensuring our patients and communities can count on access to vital healthcare services.”

Storms in the coming decades will require more extensive preparation than hospitals have employed in the past as climate change alters the way hurricanes behave, Bernstein said.

Princeton and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers found in 2015 that the odds of a hurricane with a 20-foot storm surge striking and submerging Tampa are about 1 in 10,000 today and could be as high as 1 in 700 by the end of the century.

Experts agree that if greenhouse gas consumption isn’t reduced, seas could rise by nearly 3 feet by the end of the century.

Several of the ways health care systems operate need to be changed to accommodate that, Bernstein said.

For instance, medical records are all electronic, but what happens if there’s no power? Hospital chains also aren’t financially incentivized to make medical records easily sharable to other hospital systems, Bernstein said.

“That’s the consequence of our fragmented health system, it’s that they’re in competition,” he said.

Asked what happens if electronic medical records cannot be easily shared with other hospitals after a disaster, Farmer didn’t directly address that scenario but stressed the size of HCA Healthcare’s network of facilities.

“Hospitals regularly share appropriate and necessary information when transferring patients,” he said.

In addition, in many instances large flagship hospitals are in metro areas and smaller hospitals or standalone emergency rooms are spread throughout the rest of the region. People from more rural areas are transported to the city if they develop a serious condition, Bernstein said.

But that doesn’t work if roads are damaged, or winds are too high for helicopters to fly. People in rural areas — many of them minorities or low-income — could be physically cut off from necessary health care, he said.

The study’s model doesn’t take into account flooding risk from rainfall or winds, which could be responsible for even more damage, Bernstein added.

“The measure of success for climate resilience is not whether the big hospital in the city ... gets rebuilt bigger, better and stronger,” he said. “Resilience is measured in how the communities that are most vulnerable, and the least well off, recover from these disasters.”

A population-weighted analysis of risk found out of all the metro areas studied, a Category 2 hurricane would have the fourth highest impact in Metro Orlando.

This ranking should be interpreted with caution because the study may have overestimated the risk to the area: The analysis takes into account hospital beds per 100,000 people, using the population of the entire region — approximately 2.6 million — rather than the number of people just in the service area of these three Seminole County hospitals. So there are likely more hospital beds per person than this analysis estimates.

Ccatherman@orlandosentinel.com; @CECatherman Twitter