Digging a well was Mission Hospital’s only option when it came to surviving for several months without a reliable water source.
Hurricane Helene, which was moving quickly, left the Asheville, North Carolina, area with record-breaking amounts of rain over the weekend, severely damaging the hospital there.
Hannah Drummond, a nurse at the hospital and the lead nurse representative for National Nurses United—the organization that represents nurses at Mission Hospital—said, “The entire water infrastructure to the area was obliterated.”
According to Drummond, the storm caused a backlog in the sewage system, making it impossible to flush toilets.
She claimed, “We were pissing in bags and buckets.”
Access to clean water was also wiped completely. Patients were arriving at the hospital covered in floodwater that contained chemicals, gasoline, and other unidentified poisons.
Those patients would generally be placed in showers to clean up, Drummond added. Not anymore, not after Helene tore through and destroyed the fundamentals of cleanliness.
“Decontamination has proven to be extremely challenging,” Drummond remarked. She claimed that in an attempt to rinse the patients, her staff was compelled to fill garbage cans with any clean water they could find.
She remarked, “I feel like I am living a nightmare right now.” According to Drummond, there was a moment when the hospital’s emergency room had 200 patients crammed into a space designed to hold 100.
“On Saturday, they ran out of food for us,” Drummond said. “Neither the ER staff nor the patients were eating.”
Since then, food trucks have been seen at the hospital.
A doctor at Mission Hospital told NBC News on Wednesday that HCA Healthcare, the organization in charge of managing the facility, has drilled a well to bring water to the hospital. The doctor was not authorized to speak on behalf of the hospital system.
The doctor declared, “We had no toilets.” “They needed to take action.” On Wednesday, HCA Healthcare announced that it was looking at ways to supply the hospital with pressurized water.
“HCA Healthcare is providing water trucks that supply more than 200,000 gallons of water per day, as well as hundreds of thousands of bottles of water, mobile units including kitchens, bathrooms, showers and laundry, and handwashing stations,” the company stated in a statement. “We are hopeful that the Asheville community’s infrastructure will be restored soon, but we have contingency plans in place and will continue to evaluate how best to take care of our patients and our colleagues.”
The doctor said that doctors could wash their hands and that hospital toilets were operational as of Wednesday. However, they reported that the water flowing out of the tap was unsafe to drink.
Thanks to outside assistance, the number of patients in the emergency room has also drastically decreased, the doctor continued. Visitors to patients at Mission Hospital appeared happy with their treatment.
“Considering the circumstances, it’s been really excellent,” Mark Thompson, who was visiting his mother on Wednesday, said. “The staff has excelled.” They had no control over that, even if they were without water.
Another unnamed visitor to Mission Hospital claimed that staff members from several departments collaborated there.
“They cleaned up anything that needed to be cleaned up,” the woman remarked. “There is undoubtedly a team effort, with everyone contributing.”
