Asheville – On October 3, Mission HCA’s PR director, Nancy Lindell, wrote, “Our largest concern right now is city water. We have no pressurized water at Mission Hospital” and four other Mission HCA facilities, which were being serviced by 20 tanker trucks full of water and “hundreds of thousands of bottles of water” each day.
The next day, beyond the dust and stick piles that are now Biltmore Village, Mission was surrounded by shiny silver tanker trucks. All around the hospital, trucks were pumping water while others were staged behind them. With ingenuity and effort, Mission had triumphed over the massive outage to protect the health and safety of the vulnerable people entrusted to its care.
At a Buncombe County press conference, Mission’s new CEO, Greg Lowe, announced that the hospital had “created a system of quick-connect, pressurized water.” All water in the hospital, he said, was now potable. Conservation measures were still in place, but the 200,000 gallons being pumped in daily was enough for drinking, showering, handwashing, cooking, and sterilizing instruments. As the municipal outage drags on, Mission is exploring options as extreme as digging more wells to cool its HVAC equipment.
The hospital had also run on generators for days before power was restored, and it still must continue to bring in “tens of thousands of gallons” of supplementary fuel. Satellite data networks are being used while the internet remains down.
According to NC Health News, nine days into the job, Lowe went into planning mode for Helene and “moved into crisis protocol as the deluge of rain and wind wreaked havoc throughout the mountain region.” Anticipating correctly that the hospital would be operating near capacity, staff were told to plan on sleeping at the hospital between shifts. This way, essential workers would have no compunction to drive through raging mud or be left trying to navigate road closures and traffic tie-ups with no cellular data.
To keep employees “healthy and rested” while separated from their families, the hospital set some up in hotels. It also set up temporary facilities for employees to sleep, shower, prepare food, and do laundry on premises. With telephone lines down, Mission set up a dedicated line to keep employees and patients connected with their families, provided the families could find a phone signal.
Other temporary employee amenities include tanker trucks that serve as gas stations and MiniMarts offering free food for employees. This spared them from waiting, sometimes a couple of hours, in gas and food lines. To help employees get some rest, HCA bussed in 400 nurses and 40 doctors from other HCA hospitals.
Additional assistance for employees is made possible through the HCA Healthcare Hope Fund. This is an employee-managed 501(c)(3) that provides aid to employees in distress. Lindell said so far 550 HCA employees had received a total of almost $600,000 from this fund, to which anybody may contribute.
The Hope Fund is just a part of HCA’s ongoing emergency preparedness operations. With several hospitals in Florida, it only made sense to get good at avoiding hurricane mayhem in emergency departments. The decision was made to centralize resources and information for emergency response at an Enterprise Emergency Operations Center (EEOC) in Nashville. HCA describes the center as “at the ready 24/7/365, complete with a basement bunker filled with cutting-edge equipment and technology.” An important function of the effort is learning from experience to improve efficiencies.
The US Department of Health and Human Services also helped by sending a Disaster Medical Assistance Team to assist with emergency department overload. Tents were set up outside the emergency department to treat low-acuity needs.
Lindell reported that Mission has “the staff and resources to treat all patients, including trauma patients, that come to our hospital. We have cared for more than 1,800 patients and delivered more than 50 babies since the start of the storm.”
With the emergency departments in all seven HCA hospitals in WNC operational, the EEOC’s incident response leaders decided to donate $250,000 to the United Way of Asheville and Buncombe County for disaster response and victim support, $250,000 to the American Red Cross of North Carolina for shelters, and $500,000 to “other community partners that provide direct support for hurricane-related issues.”
Mission’s satellite outpatient operations are opening as soon as it is deemed safe to do so. Patients are being asked to consult MissionHealth.org/Helene for updates. Lindell added, “We have contingency plans in place and will continue to evaluate how best to take care of our patients and our colleagues.”