AP. via Dr. Birgit Bodine
Hurricane Ian According to a doctor who works there, flooding flooded a Florida hospital from both upstairs and downstairs, the storm flooded the lower-level emergency room, while fierce winds blew off a fourth-floor roof from its intensive care unit. part torn off.
Dr. Birgit Bodine spent the night at HCA Florida Fawcett Hospital in Port Charlotte, anticipating that the storm would complicate things, “but we didn’t expect the roof on the fourth floor to blow up,” she said.
Water ran into the ICU from above on Wednesday, forcing staff to evacuate the hospital’s sickest patients – some of them on ventilators – to other floors. Staff members resorted to towels and plastic bins to clean up the soaked mess.
The medium-sized hospital spans four floors, but the damage forced patients to stay in just two.
Bodine plans to spend another night in the hospital just in case the oncoming storm’s injuries could make things worse.
“Ambulances may be coming soon and we don’t know where to put them in the hospital at this time,” she said. “Because we have doubled and tripled.”
Despite the flood, Bodine said the patients are mostly sensible and upbeat.
“For us, as much as everything is terrible and we are exhausted … as long as our patients do fine and no one dies or has a bad outcome, that’s what matters,” Bodine said.
