Reference no: EM133438853

This particular hospital was located in the southwest, close to the Mexican border, and temperatures were generally quite warm. As a matter of fact, I always said there were only two temperatures: warm or hot. In my second year at this hospital, we experienced the first freeze in 100 years. Every water line in the city broke. This city had a population of 400,000-500,000 and every home, every building, and every facility including our hospital, was affected. Now, I had been through tornadoes, snowstorms, and some other disasters, but I had never been in a situation where we did not have water, which creates a unique set of problems. It creates problems for the surgery. It creates problems with cleaning and washing items. It even creates problems with flushing the toilet, especially when you have 500-600 patients in your hospital.

So, we immediately organized the executive team to decide how we were going to operate the hospital without water for almost 4 days. The question came down to whether we should evacuate the hospital, or whether we could design a plan to supply the hospital with water. We decided not to evacuate because that would endanger our patients and would be the worst decision by our executive team. I was aware of a hospital that evacuated the whole hospital at one time. It was a terrible situation. Several patients died because they were transferred. So we really wanted to find a way to secure water and avoid evacuation.

We came up with a great idea. We negotiated with a milk company to use their 30,000-gallon milk trucks to bring us water instead of milk. We used 10 of their trucks and had them coming in every day to bring us water. We rescheduled all of the elective surgeries for another time, but we were able to handle all of the trauma cases that came into the emergency room, as well as any other surgeries we decided could not wait. We were able to wash our instruments and launder the bed linens. Luckily, we had enough water for our dietary services to feed 500-600 patients as well as 3,000 employees each day. To handle the toilet-flushing dilemma, we put a 50-gallon barrel of water by one restroom on each floor. When patients had to go to the bathroom, they would take cups of water in to flush the toilet. This certainly was one of the more unusual trauma situ- ations in my career, but our plan worked. We got through the 4 days without any major incident. The water lines came back on, and within about a week, we returned our normal operation.

1. Would you suggest any options other than evacuating or bringing in water? Was there another way you could have dealt with the situation?

2. What recommendations would you make when planning for the possibility that the hospital might experience a lack of water in the future? What backup scenario would you have planned?

3. Would you have worked with the other hospitals in the system to help them resolve some of the problems, or would you have focused on your own issues at your hospital?