Water gushed down Wednesday from above onto the ICU, forcing staff to evacuate the hospital’s sickest patients — some of them on ventilators — to other floors.
Kristen Knapp of the Florida Health Care Association says 43 nursing homes evacuated about 3,400 residents as of Thursday morning, mostly in southwest Florida.
In Orlando, residents of the Avante nursing home were evacuated to ambulances and waiting buses through floodwater in a neighborhood that doesn’t typically flood. Paramedics rolled out residents one by one on stretchers and wheelchairs. At the neighboring Palm Island at Baldwin apartment complex, cars were submerged in the parking lot.
Hurricane Ian swamped HCA Florida Fawcett Hospital in Port Charlotte - just north of Fort Myers - from both above and below, as the storm surge flooded its lower level emergency room while fierce winds tore part of its fourth floor roof from its intensive care unit, according to a doctor who works there.Dr. Birgit Bodine spent the night at the hospital, anticipating the storm would make things busy, “but we didn’t anticipate that the roof would blow off on the fourth floor,” she said.
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