All hospitals now have backup generators and above-ground power-distribution centers. Within 2 years of Allison, the TMC boosted its hazard-mitigation plans to provide protection at the 500-year flood level.
The TMC did have flood barriers and emergency action plans in place in 2001, but these were clearly inadequate to handle such rapid, catastrophic rainfall accumulation. Countless volunteers supplied fresh energy and strength.
Luke’s employees formed a human chain in the stairwell of the 23-story hospital, passing food and supplies to floors where needed. One patient could not be brought down the stairs, so volunteers broke a window, and the patient was lowered down by crane. Hundreds of patients were evacuated from the roof or carried down darkened, sweltering stairwells on backboards and loaded onto Army Black Hawk helicopters. With the power out, many patients had to be hand-ventilated, some for more than 12 hours while awaiting transport to unaffected hospitals in Houston, San Antonio, or Dallas. Hospital staff, physicians, vendors, contractors, and the community responded with a common priority-to ensure the safety of hospitalized patients while evacuating as many as possible from the crippled facilities. Missing from these statistics are stories of human kindness, resilience, and creativity under pressure. All of this was caused by a storm that at its most intense had sustained winds of only 57 mph. Nine of the 13 hospitals in the TMC were closed for some period of time. Damages in the TMC topped $6 billion (of which only $2.5 billion was insured). The entire Cullen Cardiovascular Surgical Research Laboratory was inundated and destroyed, and test animals were drowned.īy the time Allison drifted eastward toward New Orleans, the storm had dropped roughly 32 trillion gallons of water (80% of Houston’s total average annual rainfall) UTHealth alone pumped more than 10 million gallons of water from its basement. At THI, years of work on the artificial heart and heart-assist devices were wiped out. Within hours, Baylor College of Medicine had lost 90,000 research animals, 60,000 tumor samples, and 25 years of research data UTHealth also lost thousands of laboratory animals. Others trying to salvage years of work barely escaped before the rapidly rising water broke through the laboratory doors. Many animal care providers attempted to reach basement vivariums through waist-deep water and closed roadways, but they arrived too late. As surface-level flooding mounted, these underground conduits ushered in floodwaters that completely submerged the basements of TMC hospitals and research facilities-basements that housed not only critical diagnostic equipment and electrical/HVAC infrastructure, but also more than half of the research animals belonging to Baylor College of Medicine, UTHealth, and THI. Nearby Brays Bayou quickly overtopped its banks and spilled into streets and TMC buildings, most of which are interconnected through an underground network of tunnels, parking garages, utility chases, and loading docks. In the early hours of June 9 that year, Tropical Storm Allison unleashed torrential rains that brought the Texas Medical Center (TMC) to its knees.
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