Designing a Disaster-Proof Hospital
Date Posted: November 28, 2016
Posted In: Ideas,
From Fast Company: All it took was two feet of water to debilitate the Veterans Administration Hospital in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Once the flooding infiltrated the basement-level windows, it destroyed the emergency generators that the entire hospital depended on after municipal power cut out. Life support systems, lights, and heating and cooling were knocked out. At Memorial Hospital, also in New Orleans, an even more dire situation arose involving power failure, the inability to sustain patients in intensive care, and building evacuation. Forty people died there as a result of the storm, igniting a medical ethics debate about how to handle patients in disaster situations. (A doctor and two nurses were arrested for expediting the deaths of four patients; they were not convicted and the charges were expunged.)
Now, more than 10 years after Katrina hit, the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Healthcare System is celebrating the grand opening of its new hospital, a 1.7-million-square-foot facility designed by NBBJ that embodies the lessons of Katrina.
Hospitals are a literal lifeline and in the aftermath of a natural disaster. They become even more indispensable as places to treat its existing patients, admit people who were hurt as a result of the disaster, and provide emergency relief to their respective communities. The should not fail in times of crisis.
Hurricane Katrina laid bare the structural deficiencies and vulnerabilities of medical centers. In the New Orleans area, 7 of 16 hospitals with acute care centers remained closed two years after the storm. Architects tasked with rebuilding the facilities were posed with a critical challenge: rebuild the hospitals so that in the event of a similar, or even stronger, storm, the buildings remain fully functional and self-sufficient for days on end.
“It’s unfortunate, but right now the maps where we draw the extent of vulnerable areas are expanding, and areas that weren’t considered vulnerable before, are,” Ryan Hullinger, a principal at NBBJ, says. “These techniques are going to be needed in more and more hospitals.”