One of Panama City’s largest hospitals said on Thursday that it was evacuating all of its approximately 130 inpatients, starting with the most critically ill.
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 up at the door.
Hurricane Michael had strafed the place, blowing out windows and stripping some of the buildings in the sprawling complex down to their metal girders. Signage was strewn in the streets. Doctors, nurses and workers wandered outside, some crying, some looking for cell service.
The governor had announced that all of the patients in the hospital were to be evacuated. But by midmorning Thursday, at least 100 patients remained inside. And other residents of the ravaged city were still showing up asking for medical care only to be turned away. A man named Wain Hall, 23, was standing with his bicycle, screaming at a security guard by the boarded-up entrance to the emergency room.
“I got a busted head, and so 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.
[ Read here for live updates on Hurricane Michael.]
As Michael bore down and then passed, some hospitals in the region closed entirely, and others evacuated their patients, but kept staff in place to run overwhelmed emergency rooms. In Florida, four hospitals and 11 nursing facilities were closed, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Panama City has five hospitals, according to the Florida Health Association. Bay Medical, with 323 beds, and Gulf Coast Regional Medical Center, with 238, are the biggest.
Florida officials also said food and supplies were being dropped in by air to the state’s mental hospital in Chattahoochee, which is cut off by land. The mental hospital has a section that houses the criminally insane, but the facility itself has not been breached, officials said.
Gov. Nathan Deal 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 up 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.
When a storm like Michael rapidly intensifies, leaving little advance warning, it can 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 hospital and nursing home patients among the most vulnerable. In the wake of Hurricane Irma last year, 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 last year, generators failed at hospitals and nursing homes during prolonged power failures, and deaths from chronic illnesses across the population climbed. Patients having medical emergencies at home are also vulnerable. Medical personnel failed to reach some patients in time after Hurricane Harvey flooded the Houston area last August.
On Thursday, relatives of patients at hospitals and nursing homes in areas pummeled by 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 mother 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?”
So far, at least five people have died from the storm.
Bay Medical on Thursday was running with partial electricity from its generators. But there was no water and the toilets were filling up. Windows were broken. One worker said that the fourth floor was flooded — perhaps from leaky windows or roof damage. She had tied plastic bags 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 storm. But on Wednesday afternoon, the storm began battering the city and the streets all around the hospital, and soon it became evident that the hospital buildings themselves were not safe.
Inside, Dr. Roake said, the worst situation was in the intensive care unit on the upper floors of a newer glass tower. 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-heart surgery patients, critically ill septic patients, respiratory failure patients on ventilators — to safer quarters on lower floors in the central part of the building. Staff members and nurses had to carry some patients down stairways, fearing that the elevators had become unsafe, he said.
“Obviously there was a lot of emotions, but I think people held together pretty well and tucked them away for awhile and just got on with what needed to be done,” Dr. Roake said.
Now comes the process of moving the patients out. “They’re in the process of getting them transported to other hospitals — in Pensacola, wherever they can take them,” he said.
Dr. Lynn Seto was walking outside the hospital in her scrubs Thursday, and broke down in tears when asked about the state of the place. “It’s devastating,” she said. “We’re doing everything we 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 up windows, bringing in extra staff and medications, and continued to operate as the storm approached.
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 often 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 after the storm passed. Still others were facing severe challenges on Thursday afternoon, according to Kristen Knapp, director of communications for the Florida Health Care Association, which represents most of the state’s nursing centers.
