Alan Levine, chairman, president and CEO of Johnson City, Tenn.-based Ballad Health, has overseen healthcare responses for more than a dozen major hurricanes throughout his career, but he told Becker's that Hurricane Helene was unlike anything he had seen before.
Mr. Levine was the secretary of Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration during Hurricane Katrina and secretary of Louisiana's Department of Health and Hospitals during Hurricanes Gustav and Ike.
"This was unprecedented," he said, referring to the rainfall at the Nolichucky River watershed, which is near Ballad's Unicoi County Hospital in Erwin, Tenn.
"According to the Tennessee Valley Authority, this is a one-in-5,000-year event, which gives it a 0.02% probability. This was something that no one's really ever seen."
Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm, made landfall Sept. 26 in Florida's Big Bend region, causing severe flooding and damage across multiple states. In Tennessee, more than 50 patients and staff were rescued from the roof of the Unicoi County Hospital on Sept. 27. The Virginia State Police, local emergency services and National Guard units assisted in the rescue.
"Under normal circumstances, dealing with these storms, you should always be anticipating the worst. As you see a weather event coming, particularly a major hurricane, you should always anticipate all the routine and basic needs that your employees and patients will have. No. 1: Do you have a generator? Will it work? Do you have water? Do you have food? Do you have staff? Do you have the ability to take care of your patients for at least 72 hours after a storm hits?" said Mr. Levine.
"That's the normal thing you would think through when you're in a coastal area dealing with hurricanes. But here we sit up in the mountains, and no one ever thought that a hurricane would come up here and unleash this kind of flooding. It's hard for people to comprehend the unknown, and that's what we dealt with."
In this moment, Mr. Levine recalled that patients died in Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina because they weren't evacuated in time.
"So, on [Sept. 27], when I saw this water, I thought, 'This could happen here,'" Mr. Levine said.
"We were sitting around the table at the emergency operations center, and we saw what was happening. I immediately stood up, walked out, and called the governor's office. I also called the director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, because I was seeing something I had never seen before. I knew we had people at risk, and I thought, 'I'm not going to let that happen here.'"
"We got to work. We got a hold of Virginia, talked to Tennessee, and did everything we could. We sent boats in, we sent motorboats in, and sending those motorboats is what saved some lives."
Although the motorboats made it to the hospital, they couldn't leave because, by the time the boats were loaded, there was too much debris in the water for them to move forward and leave the area, Mr. Levine said. As water rose inside the hospital, patients were told to get to the roof.
"When we figured out that some of the patients couldn't get to the roof, thank God those motorboats were there because that's where we put those patients," Mr. Levine said. "We tethered the boats to the hospital and put staff in the boats with the patients to take care of them. While it had to be terrifying for both the patients and the staff, that was literally the only option we had to save their lives."
His main takeaway: "You have to do everything you can to prepare for what you think is coming, and you have to anticipate the worst-case scenario. But regardless of what you anticipate and what you plan, it may not work out, and you have to be prepared to be agile. You have to be limber, and you have to be able to plan quickly and use what you have to save lives.
"And that's what we did. I'm proud of our team for doing it. The people who were there at the hospital were thinking quickly on their feet, keeping us informed, seeking our guidance, and we were communicating with them. I think what you would hear is that the fact we were there, watching and giving them guidance, gave them comfort that they weren't alone. We had the governor of Tennessee, the governor of Virginia, and both state emergency teams behind us, the Virginia State Police, and the Tennessee National Guard. I mean, we were all working together. And the good news is, the story is that people's lives were saved, and the story isn't that anyone died because they didn't."
Patients evacuated from Unicoi County Hospital were transferred to Johnson City Medical Center, and the hospital remains closed until further notice. Ballad Health also evacuated about 40 patients from its Sycamore Shoals Hospital in Elizabethton, Tenn., due to the storm, and other health system facilities including Greeneville (Tenn.) Community Hospital suspended operations with the exception of the emergency room. Services at Greeneville Community Hospital — except for surgery — have resumed, and all Ballad Health hospitals, except Unicoi County Hospital, are open and receiving patients.
Mr. Levine said there is also a medical recovery unit at Unicoi County Hospital that is staffed with Ballad Health staff.
"I have to tell you, when I went there [recently] to visit the staff, almost everybody there working was on the roof of the hospital on [Sept. 27]," he said. "And when I walked in, they all started crying because they were so happy to be able to get back to work and help their neighbors."
Ballad Health is a 20-hospital system operating across Northeast Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, Northwest North Carolina, and Southeast Kentucky.