Advanced practice regsitered nurse Ashley Abt and Doctors’ Memorial Hospital CEO Lauren Faison-Clark in Perry, Florida. (Photo credit: Liam Fineout)
On the health care front lines in Florida these are the people who work to hold back the storm for hospitalized patients and nursing home residents.
The 2024 Atlantic Hurricane Season, which ends on Saturday, put many of them to the test.
Five hurricanes made landfall in the continental United States and two of them pummeled Florida just weeks apart.
Hurricane Helene hit as a Category 4 storm near the city of Perry in the early morning hours on Sept. 26. Helene was the strongest hurricane on record to strike the Big Bend region of Florida and, with more than 150 direct fatalities in the southeastern states, the deadliest hurricane to affect the continental United States since Hurricane Katrina.
Hurricane Milton made landfall on Florida’s west coast on Oct. 9 as a Category 5 hurricane.
Florida Hospital Association CEO and President Mary Mayhew said hospitals take storm planning and preparation seriously.
“You want hospitals before, during, and after a storm,” Mayhew told the Florida Phoenix. “But every hospital has to do a risk assessment based upon their physical plant, their location, and the number of patients that can be safely transferred, evacuated. All of that goes into consideration.”
At the height of Hurricane Helene, 98 health care facilities offering a range of services, from assisted living facilities to nursing homes to hospitals to residential treatment facilities, reported evacuations to the state. Of those, 27 were nursing homes, eight were hospitals, and one was a hospital emergency department.
At the height of Milton, 212 health facilities reported evacuations, including 10 hospitals, two freestanding hospital emergency departments, and 50 nursing homes.
Famous or infamous?
Lauren Faison-Clark is CEO of Doctors’ Memorial Hospital in Perry, a position she’s held for a year, and worked as interim CEO for the year before that. She’s been at the helm of the rural hospital for three storms in the past two years: Hurricanes Helene and Debby (which hit in August) and Hurricane Idalia (which hit Keaton Beach on Aug. 30, 2023.)
“I don’t think a lot of people across the country probably have even heard of Perry or Steinhatchee, Florida, but now we’re famous on The Weather Channel because of those three storms,” Faison-Clark told the Florida Phoenix. “And it’s, it’s weary. People are very weary. They’re very mentally tired.”
During hurricanes, Faison-Clark said, hospital staff are assigned to two categories: Group A and Group B. Both are tasked with coming to work when hurricanes approach. Staff are asked to arrive before winds exceed 35 miles per hour, which is when it becomes unsafe for people to drive.
Group A takes the first shift, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Group B is asked to shelter in place at the facility so they are there to relieve Group A when that shift ends.
“As health care people do, they kick into gear and they pack up their bags, and you have your team show up for the storm. Some of them are nervous, some are scared, some of them are mad that they have to be here, but they do it,” Faison-Clark said.
Blown away
Ashley Abt joined Doctors’ Memorial Hospital as clinical director of the emergency room on Sept. 1. He and his wife, Noni, had taken steps to prepare their Keaton Beach home for Hurricane Helene. It’s a routine they have become familiar with.
Two months after the storm, here’s how they are faring
SU SURIANO: The nursing home administrator from Tarpon Springs has replaced a lot of what she lost and says she is in a better frame of mind than she was in September and October following Hurricane Helene. Hurricane Milton, a bigger more powerful hurricane that was projected to directly hit her area but didn’t, inflicted more psychic damage than physical. That’s because Suriano became aware of everything that wasn’t lost in Helene that could be lost in the second storm.
“We’re rebuilding and cleaning up. We are in the process of thinking about leaving our neighborhood, as well. But now that things are back into place, you almost feel like things are back to normal. So, you kind of forget. I mean, people forget very, very easily until the next storm season begins next summer,” Suriano said.
“I’m not quite sure what we’re planning on doing just yet, but for right this moment, with the beautiful weather, we have some family down from Philly right now. Things are you kind of just forget the bad couple of months that we just had,” she said.
Suriano has received insurance settlements, and a contractor has been working on the house. Her husband, who’s handy, has been able to help replace drywall and make other fixes.
KIM MERRICK: The nursing home worker from Crystal River reports that most of the stuff in her home is packed up in boxes. She’s waiting for her wood floors, which buckled under four-and-a-half feet of water during Helene’s storm surge, to get replaced. The water flooded all her kitchen appliances but only her dishwasher has stopped working.
Merrick said she has a claim with FEMA. She routinely checks the status of the claim online but it always says “pending.”
Merrick is one of 185 nursing home employees who have received a stipend from the Florida Health Care Association, a statewide nursing home organization that raised $50,000 to assist long term care workers who suffered damage during the storm season.
ASHLEY ABT: The clinical director of the emergency room at Doctors’ Memorial Hospital in Perry lost his Keaton Beach home in Hurricane Helene.
He is fully insured, with a homeowner’s policy as well as federal flood insurance. He received a $750 payment from FEMA following the storm but nothing from his insurance company.
From the start, Abt said, he had problems with his carrier, including failure to make a timely response to his claim. He called the state insurance office for assistance.
Meanwhile, the company told him this week that the loss of his house wasn’t covered by his policy because his house had been swept away by flood waters, not wind. He’s waiting to see if the state can help before hiring an attorney.
“I just kind of laughed when they told me that, that it was purely flood, and that there was no wind, and that they could actually determine that when there’s no house to even look at,” Abt said.
He and his wife Noni have been renting a tiny house in Keaton Beach — no small feat for Abt, a towering man well above six feet tall.
“Me and my wife have gotten really close. It’s interesting and different,” he said. “The ceilings are way lower than I’m used to, but, but it is what it is. You know, all things considered. It’s good, you know — we have AC, heat, a flushing toilet, and hot water. All things considered, it could be a lot worse.”
“We get the boat out of the water, and we do this and we do that. We tie this stuff down, and, you know, take cushions off of porch furniture and put the cushions inside and pile them up together next to the house. And, you know, make sure everything’s inside and everything’s secured.” Abt told the Phoenix.
The following day, his wife evacuated to a friend’s home in South Georgia and Abt went to Doctors’ Memorial and sheltered in place.
He recalled watching the storm veer toward Perry and wondering whether he should have gotten additional sandbags or boarded up the house better.
“Luckily, I didn’t waste the time or money on sandbags or plywood, because I don’t think any amount of that would have helped,” he said.
He left the hospital after the storm hit and headed toward the beach to check on his house. But the road was closed and he couldn’t make it. A man he met on the side of the road with a drone provided him the footage he needed to confirm what he already suspected — that the storm had demolished his house.
Faison-Clark recalled the look in Abt’s eyes when he returned to the hospital later that day.
“Once he talked to his wife and figured out what’s going on, I made him leave,” she said, telling him he needed to take time with let reality sink in.
“He wanted to be here to help work,” she said. “You know, at some point you’re no good to others if you don’t take care of yourself first. We teach that all the time in health care — care for yourself so you can care for others.”
In addition to working at the hospital Abt, an advanced practice registered nurse, and his wife, also a nurse, operate a health clinic in Keaton Beach called Second Wind Hydration. Despite the total loss of their home, they don’t plan to move from the area.
Abt (pictured) lost their Keaton Beach home during Hurricane Helene. But they aren’t moving from the area. (Photo courtesy Ashley Abt)
“Me and my wife just kind of stood on our lot, on our empty lot, and I was like, ‘You want to go somewhere else? ‘ And she said,’ No.’ And I said, ‘All right, happy wife, happy life. Let’s get it. ‘ ”
Feeling better by helping
Roughly 700 nursing homes operate in Florida, data maintained by the state Agency for Health Care Administration show. The facilities house some of the most vulnerable citizens in the state and managing their safety during storms is complicated.
Kim Merrick is a certified occupational therapist assistant at Crystal River Health and Rehabilitation. Because the facility is located in a low-lying coastal area, it evacuates residents when a storm approaches.
The certified nurse assistants and nursing staff travel with the residents during evacuations, Merrick said. Because she is not a nurse, Merrick’s hurricane duty involves helping transfer residents from their rooms onto the buses that drive them to sister facilities in other areas of the state that are not threatened.
For Hurricane Helene, Merrick said, residents moved to facilities in Ocala and Daytona. The residents in the memory care unit went to a Citrus County facility that also has a such a unit.
After helping put the resident on the buses, Merrick returned to the house where she has lived for 21 years with her husband, and they started preparing for the storm. They anticipated the water coming near the garage and prepared by placing sandbags around the lower lying areas near their home, she said. But they never anticipated what was going to happen.
“My neighbor across the street is an elderly woman and she has lived here for over 50 years, and she said the houses here have never flooded, hers and ours,” Merrick recalled.
Her husband and son stayed awake waiting for Helene to arrive but she drifted off to sleep.
“They woke me up, and it was just, you just saw it coming, and started coming under the doors. And we just picked up what we could off of the floor and got it as high as we could. By that point, you know, there’s, that’s all you can do. It’s dark. We had no power, so we basically just sat there and waited for it to stop,” she recalled, her voice trembling.
While the residents returned to the facility the Friday following the storm, Merrick spent three days sorting through ruins and trying to dry out a flooded home. She returned to work Monday to take care of the residents.
“It makes you think. A lot of them don’t have anybody. The facility staff is their family, their caregivers. They need help and it makes you feel better to help them.”
Different this time
Su Soriano has been a licensed nursing home administrator for nearly 30 years and works at the Oakpark Health and Rehabilitation Center in Tampa.
She’s hands-on at the facility when a storm threatens. “Days in advance,” she said, staff make sure the generators have 96 hours-worth of gas as required by law and that the facility has seven days of food and water. Soriano also checks oxygen supplies and whether the pharmacy has what it needs.
One of the biggest challenges in preparing for storms for Soriano lies outside the walls of the nursing facility: keeping staff calm and prepared so they are able to work.
Like many long-time Florida residents, Soriano has seen her share of hurricanes over the years. This time was different: Hurricane Helene flooded the first floor of her two-story Tarpon Springs home — which is built on stilts. She lost two cars and all the possessions downstairs. Her living space, the kitchen, bedrooms, family room, are on the second floor and weren’t damaged.
As customary, she was at work during landfall and on a group text with her husband and her neighbors. Soriano said her husband wasn’t responding to the group chat messages and she started to worry.
“It wasn’t until my next door neighbor posted a video of what was happening in her own home — which was the water was just crashing into her front door, and she and her husband were trying to hold the door closed as the water was coming in — and it wasn’t until then that I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, look, that’s happening with our neighbors. Obviously, it’s happening at our own house. “
Just days later, Soriano found herself headed to the facility to once again prepare for a storm, this one Hurricane Milton.
For Soriano, the experience was different than it had been in the past; her thought process, she said, had completely changed.
“I packed up my house crazily, as if I were, I was saying goodbye to it, and we just packed up our things that were of sentimental value and everything else we kind of left behind,” she said.
“But it was a very scary experience for me personally this time, because we had just gone through it with Helene, and then just, I mean, back-to-back, Milton came. But you know, all in all, we were very fortunate. And I was very happy to come in. We never lost power. We never lost electricity.”
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.