At the least 170 US hospitals face main flood threat. Specialists say Trump is making it worse – Day by day Information

By Holly Ok. Hacker, Brett Kelman, Daniel Chang, Hannah Norman Lydia Zuraw, KFF Well being Information

LOUISVILLE, Tenn. — When a giant storm hits, Peninsula Hospital might be underwater.

At this decades-old psychiatric hospital on the sting of the Tennessee River, an intense storm might submerge the constructing in 11 ft of water, reducing off all roads across the facility, based on a classy pc simulation of flood threat.

Aurora, a younger lady who was dedicated to Peninsula as a youngster, stated the hospital sits so near the river that it felt like a moat conserving her and dozens of different sufferers inside. KFF Well being Information agreed to not publish her full title as a result of she shared non-public medical historical past.

“My first feeling is doom,” Aurora stated as she watched the simulation of the river rising across the hospital. “These are in all probability among the most susceptible folks.”

Covenant Well being, which runs Peninsula Hospital, stated in an announcement it has a “proactive and thorough method to emergency planning” however declined to offer particulars or reply questions.

Peninsula is one in every of about 170 American hospitals, totaling almost 30,000 affected person beds from coast to coast, that face the best threat of great or harmful flooding, based on a months-long KFF Well being Information investigation based mostly on information supplied by Fathom, an organization thought-about a frontrunner in flood simulation. At many of those hospitals, flooding from heavy storms has the potential to jeopardize affected person care, block entry to emergency rooms, and power evacuations. Typically there isn’t a different hospital close by.

A lot of this threat to hospitals just isn’t captured by flood maps issued by the Federal Emergency Administration Company, which have served because the nation’s de facto instrument for flood estimation for half a century, regardless of being incomplete and typically a long time old-fashioned. As FEMA’s maps have turn out to be divorced from the fact of a altering local weather, non-public firms like Fathom have crammed the hole with simulations of future floods. However lots of their predictions are behind a paywall, leaving the general public largely reliant on free, considerably restricted authorities maps.

“That is extremely regarding,” stated Caleb Dresser, who research local weather change and is each an emergency room physician and a Harvard College assistant professor. “When you don’t have the knowledge to know you’re in danger, then how will you triage that drawback?”

The deadliest hospital flooding in fashionable American historical past occurred 20 years in the past throughout Hurricane Katrina, when the our bodies of 45 folks have been recovered from New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Heart, together with some sufferers whom investigators suspected have been euthanized. Extra flooding deaths have been narrowly prevented one yr in the past when helicopters rescued dozens of individuals as Hurricane Helene engulfed Unicoi County Hospital in Erwin, Tennessee.

Rebecca Harrison, a paramedic, known as her kids from the Unicoi roof to say goodbye.

“I used to be scared to dying, pondering, ‘That is it,’” Harrison advised CBS Information, which interviewed Unicoi survivors as a part of KFF Well being Information’ investigation. “Alarms have been going off. Folks have been screaming. It was chaos.”

The investigation — among the many first to research nationwide hospital flood threat in an period of warming local weather and worsening storms — comes because the administration of President Donald Trump has slashed federal companies that forecast and reply to excessive climate and in addition dismantled FEMA packages designed to guard hospitals and different vital buildings from floods.

When requested to remark, FEMA stated flooding is a standard, pricey, and “underneath appreciated” catastrophe however made no assertion particular to hospitals. Spokesperson Daniel Llargués defended the administration’s modifications to FEMA by reissuing an August assertion that dismissed criticism as coming from “bureaucrats who presided over a long time of inefficiency.”

Alice Hill, an Obama administration local weather threat skilled, stated the Trump administration’s dismissal of local weather change and worsening floods would waste billions of {dollars} and endanger lives.

In 2015, Hill led the creation of the Federal Flood Threat Administration Normal, which required that hospitals and different important constructions be elevated or incorporate further flood protections to qualify for federal funding.

FEMA stopped imposing the usual in March.

“Folks will die because of among the selections being made as we speak,” Hill stated. “We will likely be much less ready than we at the moment are. And we already have been, in my estimation, poorly ready.”

‘Flood Threat Is In every single place’

The KFF Well being Information investigation recognized greater than 170 hospitals going through a flood threat by evaluating the places of greater than 7,000 amenities to peer-reviewed flood hazard mapping supplied by Fathom, a United Kingdom firm that simulates flooding in areas as small as 10 meters utilizing laser-precision elevation measurements from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Hospitals have been decided to have a major threat if Fathom’s 100-year flood information predicted {that a} foot or extra of water might attain a substantial portion of their buildings, excluding parking garages, or minimize off highway entry to the hospital. A 100-year flood is an intense climate occasion that has roughly a 1% probability of occurring in any given yr however can occur extra usually.

The investigation discovered heightened flood dangers at massive trauma facilities, small rural hospitals, kids’s hospitals, and long-term care amenities that serve older and disabled sufferers. At the least 21 are vital entry hospitals, with the next-closest hospital 25 miles away, on common.

Flooding threatens dozens of hospitals in coastal areas, together with in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and New York. Farther inland, flooding of rivers or creeks might envelop different hospitals, notably in Appalachia and the Midwest. Even within the sun-soaked cities and arid expanses of the American West, storms have the potential to encompass some hospitals with a number of ft of pooling water, based on Fathom’s information.

These findings are probably an undercount of hospitals in danger as a result of the investigation missed pockets of potential flooding at some hospitals. It excluded amenities like stand-alone ERs, outpatient clinics, and nursing properties.

“The truth is that flood threat is in all places. It’s the most pervasive of perils,” stated Oliver Wing, the chief scientific officer at Fathom, who reviewed the findings. “Simply since you’ve by no means skilled an excessive doesn’t imply you by no means will.”

Dresser, the ER physician, stated even a small quantity of flooding can shut down an unprepared hospital, usually by interrupting its energy provide, which is required for life-sustaining gear like ventilators and coronary heart displays. He stated essentially the most susceptible hospitals would probably be in rural areas.

“Plenty of rural hospitals at the moment are closing their pediatric items, closing their psychiatry items,” Dresser stated. “In a financially confused state of affairs, it may be laborious to prioritize long-term threats, even when they’re, for some establishments, probably existential.”

City hospitals can face harmful flooding, too. Fathom’s information predicts 5 to fifteen ft of water round neighboring hospitals — Kadlec Regional Medical Heart and Lourdes Behavioral Well being — that straddle a tiny creek in Richland, Washington.

By Fathom’s estimate, a 100-year flood might trigger the close by Columbia River to spill over a levee that protects Richland, then loosely observe the creek to the hospitals. A number of the deepest flooding is estimated round Lourdes, which was constructed on land the U.S. Military Corps of Engineers put aside in 1961 as a “ponding and drainage easement.”

On the time, this land was imagined to be able to storing sufficient water to fill no less than 40 Olympic-size swimming swimming pools, based on navy paperwork obtained by means of the Freedom of Data Act. A psychological well being facility has occupied this spot because the Nineteen Seventies.

‘All of the Components of a Actual Catastrophe’

One yr in the past, as Hurricane Helene carved a lethal path throughout Southern Appalachia, Angel Mitchell was visiting her ailing mom at Unicoi County Hospital within the tiny city of Erwin, Tennessee.

Swollen by Helene, the close by Nolichucky River spilled over its banks and across the hospital, which was inbuilt a flood plain. Employees tried to bar the doorways, Mitchell stated, however the water acquired in, trapping her and others inside. The lights went out. Folks fled to the roof, the place the roar of speeding water almost drowned out the method of rescue helicopters, Mitchell stated.

Finally, 70 folks from the hospital, together with Mitchell and her mom, have been airlifted to security on Sept. 27, 2024. The hospital stays closed, and the corporate that owns it, Ballad Well being, has stated its reopening is unsure.

“Why enable one thing — particularly a hospital — to be inbuilt an space like that?” Mitchell advised CBS Information. “Folks need to depend on these areas to get medical assist, they usually’re harmful.”

Past Unicoi, KFF Well being Information recognized 39 inland hospitals — together with 16 in Appalachia — that Fathom predicts might flood when close by rivers, creeks, or drainage canals overspill their banks, even in storms far much less intense than Helene.

For instance, within the Cumberland Mountains of southwestern Virginia, a 100-year flood is projected to trigger Slate Creek to engulf Buchanan Normal Hospital in additional than 5 ft of water.

Close to the Nice Lakes in Erie, Pennsylvania, LECOM Medical Heart and Behavioral Well being Pavilion might turn out to be flooded by a small drainage creek that’s lower than 50 ft from the entrance door of the ER.

Neither Buchanan nor LECOM responded to questions on flooding or preparations.

And in West Virginia’s capital of Charleston, the place about 50,000 folks stay on the junction of two rivers in a large and flat valley, a single storm might probably flood 5 of the town’s six hospitals without delay, together with colleges, church buildings, hearth departments, and different amenities.

“I hate to say it,” stated Behrang Bidadian, a flood plain supervisor on the West Virginia GIS Technical Heart, “but it surely has all the weather of an actual catastrophe.”

Shanen Wright, 48, a lifelong Charleston resident who lives close to CAMC Memorial, stated many within the metropolis have little fear about flooding within the face of extra quick issues, just like the opioid epidemic and the decline of producing and mining.

Tugboats and coal barges sail previous his neighborhood as in the event that they have been vehicles on his avenue.

“It’s to not say it’s not a chance,” he stated. “I’m positive the folks in Asheville and the folks in Texas, the place the floods took so many lives, they in all probability didn’t see it coming both.”

‘The Water Is Coming’

Regardless of huge scientific consensus that local weather change fuels extra harmful climate, the Trump administration has taken the place that issues about international warming are overblown. In a speech to the United Nations in September, Trump known as local weather change “the best con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

The Trump administration has made deep employees and funding cuts to FEMA, NOAA, and the Nationwide Climate Service. At FEMA, the cuts prompted 191 present and former staff to publish a letter in August warning that the company is being dismantled from inside.

Daniel Swain, a College of California local weather scientist, stated the administration’s rejection of local weather change has left the nation much less ready for excessive climate, now and sooner or later.

“It’s akin to imposing malpractice scientifically,” Swain stated. “Think about making a medical choice the place you aren’t allowed to have a look at 20% of the affected person’s important indicators or check outcomes.”

Below Trump, FEMA has additionally taken actions critics say will go away the nation extra susceptible to flooding, particularly:

• FEMA disbanded the Technical Mapping Advisory Council, which had repeatedly pushed the company to modernize its flood maps to estimate future threat and account for the impacts of local weather change.
• FEMA canceled its Constructing Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which supplied grants to assist communities and important buildings, together with hospitals, defend themselves from floods and different pure disasters.
• And after stopping enforcement early this yr, FEMA intends to rescind the Federal Flood Threat Administration Normal, which was designed to harden buildings towards future floods and save tax {dollars} in the long term.

Berginnis, of the Affiliation of State Floodplain Managers, stated the administration’s unwillingness to organize for local weather change and worsening storms would end in a harmful and expensive cycle of flooding, rebuilding, and flooding once more.

“The president is saying we’re closed for enterprise with regards to hazard mitigation,” Berginnis stated. “It bugs me to no finish that we’ve to have reminders — like folks dying — to point out us why it’s vital to make these investments.”

FEMA didn’t reply particular questions on these selections. Within the assertion to KFF Well being Information, spokesperson Llargués touted the administration’s response to flooding in Texas and New Mexico and stated FEMA had supplied billions of {dollars} to assist folks and communities recuperate and rebuild. He didn’t point out any FEMA funding for safeguarding towards future floods.

Few hospitals perceive this menace greater than the previous Coney Island Hospital in New York Metropolis, which has suffered catastrophic flooding earlier than and has ready for it to return once more.

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 compelled the hospital to evacuate a whole lot of sufferers. When the water receded, fish and a sea turtle have been discovered within the constructing.

Eleven years later, the power reopened as Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospital, remodeled by a FEMA-funded $923 million reconstruction mission that added a 4-foot floodwall and elevated affected person care areas and utility infrastructure above the primary flooring.

It’s now probably probably the most flood-proofed hospitals within the nation.

However, to this point, no storm has examined the power.

Svetlana Lipyanskaya, CEO of NYC Well being+Hospitals/South Brooklyn Well being, which incorporates the rebuilt hospital, stated the query of flooding is “not an if however a when.”

“I hope it doesn’t occur in my lifetime,” she stated, “however frankly, I’d be stunned. The water is coming.”

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Methodology

After Hurricane Helene made landfall a yr in the past, a raging river flooded a rural hospital in jap Tennessee. Sufferers and staff have been rescued from the rooftop. Floods have hit hospitals from New York to Nebraska to Texas lately. We wished to find out what number of different U.S. hospitals face comparable peril. Finally, we discovered greater than 170 hospitals in danger.

For this evaluation, we used information from Fathom, a United Kingdom-based firm that focuses on flood-risk modeling throughout the globe. To evaluate the US’ vulnerability, Fathom makes use of subtle pc simulations and detailed terrain information masking the nation. It accounts for environmental elements resembling local weather change, soil circumstances, and plenty of rivers and creeks not mapped by different sources. Fathom’s modeling has been peer-reviewed and utilized by insurance coverage firms, the World Financial institution, the Nature Conservancy, and authorities companies in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. The Iowa Flood Heart has validated Fathom’s U.S. information.

By a knowledge use settlement, Fathom shared its U.S. mapping information that predicts areas with no less than a 1% probability of flooding in any given yr. Fathom’s information estimates the results of three predominant sorts of flooding: coastal, fluvial (from overflowing rivers, lakes, or streams), and pluvial (rainfall that the bottom can’t take in). The info additionally accounts for dams, reservoirs, and different constructions that defend towards floods.

To establish at-risk hospitals, we used a publicly accessible Division of Homeland Safety database containing the GPS coordinates of greater than 7,000 short-term acute, vital entry, rehab, and psychiatric hospitals — mainly any hospital with inpatient providers. (DHS underneath the Trump administration has discontinued public entry to the database, so information for hospitals and different infrastructure is now not extensively accessible.)

Utilizing GPS coordinates because the centerpoint, we created a circle with a 150-yard radius round every hospital, which normally captured the constructing plus close by grounds and entry roads. We then mapped Fathom’s flood-risk information to see the place it overlapped with these circles. We began by searching for hospitals the place no less than 20% of the circle’s space had a predicted flood depth of no less than 1 foot. That gave us an preliminary checklist of greater than 320 hospitals throughout the U.S.

From there, we visually inspected these hospitals utilizing mapping software program and Google Maps, each satellite tv for pc and avenue view. We trimmed our checklist to solely the hospitals the place a substantial portion of the constructing or all entry roads have been predicted to have no less than a foot of flooding.

If two hospitals have been mapped to the identical constructing — for example, a small rehab facility inside a big hospital — we counted just one hospital. We additionally excluded hospitals just lately transformed to nursing properties or for different makes use of.

We ended up with an inventory of 171 hospitals throughout the U.S. That’s almost definitely an undercount. Some hospitals might nonetheless face vital influence from flooding that isn’t deep sufficient or widespread sufficient to suit our methodology. Our evaluation additionally doesn’t account for the way flooding farther from a hospital might have an effect on staff or sufferers. And it doesn’t assess what steps hospitals could have already taken to organize for extreme climate occasions.

We additionally ran a spatial evaluation evaluating Fathom’s information with flood hazard maps from the Federal Emergency Administration Company, which in lots of instances are incomplete or haven’t been up to date in years. We discovered that a couple of third of hospitals recognized as flood dangers by Fathom’s information didn’t overlap in any respect with FEMA’s 100- or 500-year hazard areas.

Fathom supplied steerage and suggestions as we developed our evaluation.

CBS Information correspondent David Schechter and photojournalist Likelihood Horner contributed to this report.

©2025 KFF Well being Information. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company, LLC.

Initially Printed: October 9, 2025 at 9:55 AM PDT