Hello.

I’m subbing in for Amy this week to tell you what we learned in a new KFF Health News investigation about flooding risk to hospitals.

Peninsula Hospital, an inpatient psychiatric facility, is situated just feet from the Tennessee River. According to a sophisticated computer simulation of flood risk, an intense storm could submerge the building in 11 feet of water, cutting off all roads around it.

One former patient said the river felt like a moat that could trap her and dozens of other patients inside. 

Peninsula is one of about 170 American hospitals, totaling nearly 30,000 patient beds from coast to coast, that face the greatest risk of significant or dangerous flooding, according to our months-long investigation by Holly Hacker, Brett Kelman, and Daniel Chang that was based on data provided by Fathom, a company considered a leader in flood simulation.

At many of these hospitals, flooding from heavy storms could jeopardize patient care, emergency rooms, and force evacuations. Sometimes there is no other hospital nearby.

The investigation found significant flood risk at hospitals in cities and rural areas, mountains and plains, coasts, and deserts. In Richland, Washington, two neighboring hospitals could be engulfed by 5 to 15 feet of water. In Charleston, West Virginia, an intense storm could flood five of the city’s six hospitals at once.

“The reality is that flood risk is everywhere. It is the most pervasive of perils,” said Oliver Wing, the chief scientific officer at Fathom, who reviewed the findings. “Just because you’ve never experienced an extreme doesn’t mean you never will.”

Much of this risk to hospitals is not captured by flood maps issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which have served as the nation’s de facto tool for flood estimation for half a century, despite being incomplete and sometimes decades out of date. As FEMA’s maps have become divorced from the reality of a changing climate, private companies like Fathom have filled the gap with simulations of future floods. But many of their predictions are behind a paywall, leaving the public mostly reliant on free, significantly limited government maps.

“This is highly concerning,” said Caleb Dresser, who studies climate change and is both an emergency room doctor and a Harvard University assistant professor. “If you don’t have the information to know you’re at risk, then how can you triage that problem?”

Covenant Health, which runs Peninsula Hospital, said in a statement it has a “proactive and thorough approach to emergency planning” but declined to provide details or answer questions. 

The investigation — among the first to analyze nationwide hospital flood risk in an era of warming climate and worsening storms — comes as the administration of President Donald Trump has slashed federal agencies that forecast and respond to extreme weather and also dismantled FEMA programs designed to protect hospitals and other important buildings from floods.

When asked to comment, FEMA said flooding is a common, costly, and “under appreciated” disaster but made no statement specific to hospitals. 

Alice Hill, an Obama administration climate risk expert, in 2015 led the creation of the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which required that hospitals and other essential structures be elevated or incorporate extra flood protections to qualify for federal funding.

FEMA stopped enforcing the standard in March.

“People will die as a result of some of the choices being made today,” Hill said. “We will be less prepared than we are now. And we already were, in my estimation, poorly prepared.”

You can see which hospitals are at risk here:

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