Charleston's Hospitals And Medical Offices Squarely In Bullseye Of Continual, Growing Flooding
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In a city where some streets fill with water even on sunny days and seas have risen rapidly over the past decade and a half, Charleston’s medical district is among the neighborhoods that bear the brunt of flooding, particularly when storms like Debby, come through. It’s an area that is regularly bogged down in water but holds some of South Carolina’s most important medical sites, including hospitals for children and veterans and the region’s only level 1 trauma center. Its facilities on the city’s peninsula treat some 400,000 patients each year and employ around 25,000 people.
Hospital employees have come to see flood mitigation as just another part of the job — during one particularly bad flood last year, some had to take a boat to work. When residents start each July, Thomas, a teaching physician at the Medical University of South Carolina, makes sure they know the drill: If a big rain event is coming, park your car on the second floor; try to leave work when tides are low, especially during a full moon; and make sure you know where the worst flooding occurs.
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MUSC on Monday entered emergency mode for Debby, which dropped between 10 and 15 inches on the city. More than 1,000 people, including doctors, nurses and technicians, spent two nights in the hospital, sleeping on cots or air mattresses, said Kimberly M. Bailey, the system’s director of emergency management. She works throughout the year training employees on storm and flooding mitigation. It went back to regular operations Thursday morning. Elective surgeries were postponed, as were discharges. Many appointments were held virtually. Flood barriers were raised. While it didn’t prove necessary this time — the area saw isolated flooding — the hospital has the capability to move all their operations off the first floor in the case of severe storms, said Thomas Crawford, the system chief operating officer.
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And they have to be. When many of the facilities were built here in the 1940s and 1950s, flooding likely wasn’t as much of an issue, said Steven A. Kirk, an engineer for the city who focuses on flooding mitigation. But with rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms linked to climate change, it would make sense that “what they were experiencing back then wasn’t nearly as bad as what we are experiencing today.” The city has launched ambitious flood mitigation projects, including the construction of a third pump station, capable of draining 360,000 gallons per minute, that is scheduled to be completed in 2026, Kirk said. A small $15 million drainage tunnel extension to the pump station in the hospital district was completed in May. The extension is on Erhardt Street, a flood-weary lane near the MUSC children’s hospital and Roper Hospital. There, a 4½-foot wide and 130-foot-deep shaft was built to catch the rainwater that can rush through the campus. A vortex box spins the water from the street down the duct, in a toilet-flush-like motion.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/08/08/charleston-flooding-hospitals-medical-district-debby/