Take Lessons from Recent Hurricanes to Get Ready for Winter Storms
It’s time to prepare for severe weather
Preparing for severe winter weather is exactly like preparing for a hurricane. Well, kind of.
A recent article in Becker’s Hospital Review highlighted how some facilities prepared for, managed, and successfully navigated Hurricanes Helene and Milton.
The article outlines ways to prepare for natural disasters and stay open during the storm. Some of these activities—building comprehensive emergency operations plans (EOPs), creating checklists, and implementing mitigation strategies—are no-brainers and are already foundational components within the walls of many health care facilities and emergency management programs.
But even if you do not live in a region affected by hurricanes, I’m here to tell you that you should pay attention to the emergency response from these incidents.
Finding Solutions amid Emergencies
If you live in a hurricane region or elsewhere, we all need to be solution-finders.
Just like every business and industry within hurricane-prone regions, health care facilities rely on public infrastructure. And while hospitals and post-acute care facilities and services can control many things, they must adapt quickly when critical systems like water and sewer go offline.
Finding ways to adapt when our power, water, or sewer systems fail feels daunting, but it actually happens regularly.
Innovative thinking and adapting new concepts and strategies certainly help us stabilize and maintain some continuity. When Helene devastated many portions of western North Carolina, hospitals and health systems searched for ways to mend a fractured delivery of care process:
A Cold Reality
Events like Helene should remind us that we’re not going to outrun Father Time or Mother Nature. Infrastructure is aging. Old power lines and the ancient transformer that supplies lighting and heating to our nursing home residents, are one high-wind event away from becoming useless. The structural wear and cracking on a dam or levee, which might be miles and miles upstream from our facility and well out of sight, might be a heavy rain or a massive snowmelt away from weakening and failing.
The 100-year-old water main, half a block away from the front doors of our facility, is primed to rupture at the first drop in temperature.
What you Should Do
As the first day of winter inches closer, health care facilities should recognize the potential threats that cold rain, strong winds, snow, and ice can have on operations.
Looking at freezing temperatures alone, we know there are vulnerabilities.
These events wreak havoc on buildings, businesses, and infrastructure. Like the North Carolina hospitals left without water from Hurricane Helene, a ruptured water main or frozen pipes can leave a facility without water pressure and in a cold, soaking mess.
We can’t predict which of our water mains will break, but we must be ready for any event. This is true if you live in Buffalo or southwest Ohio or even unexpected places like Memphis or Dallas. If you’ve ever experienced an event like this, you know all too well the complexities associated with them and days and weeks it takes to feel some sort of normalcy.
To get ready for this winter season, you should:
- Work across your teams to receive feedback in your emergency planning
- Coordinate communication and resources for all key events, including public infrastructure failures
- Review incident reports to see what’s working and what could require some innovative solutions
- Outline staff responsibilities before these emergencies arise and think about how you will offer “respite” to staff who are stepping up in real-time
If we are not properly prepared, communication, supplies, and staff morale can quickly fracture, deplete, and deteriorate.
We can get ahead of this by thinking ahead, working together, and an accepting that emergencies in other parts of the country could hold lessons for us to learn in our communities at any time.
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Tags: Emergency Management | Disaster Preparedness