TAMPA, Fla. — Right now, thousands of residents living in Florida nursing homes and assisted living facilities are being forced to move for the second time in two weeks, while others never went back to their homes after Hurricane Helene.
Nursing homes already closed due to damage from Hurricane Helene
The I-Team has been combing through the data and has identified dozens of Tampa Bay area nursing homes or assisted living facilities located in evacuation zone A.
That means frail elderly residents must be moved to other locations whenever a hurricane or tropical storm threatens them.
Thousands of additional residents of senior residential care facilities live in evacuation zones B, C, D, and E.
In 2017, rescue workers and volunteers scrambled to save seniors in a Texas nursing home as rising water threatened them.
The same year, eight people died at the Rehabilitation Center in Hollywood Hills, in Hollywood, FL, because a prolonged power outage caused them to overheat.
A study from the University of South Florida and Brown University estimates almost 500 other seniors died indirectly from Hurricane Irma in the 90-day period that followed.
“There’s no standard”
Following those tragedies, the Florida Legislature passed new requirements for emergency generators and emergency evacuation plans.
But emergency management expert Adam Montella said sometimes those plans fail.
“The problem is there's no standard for that plan. And there are so many, there's thousands of ALFs and nursing facilities,” Montalla said. “The counties are supposed to sign off on them, but they don't have time to review them to the detail that we probably would like to have.”
Montella says residents of nursing homes often need frequent medication, have special equipment and are not mobile.
“It's not a one-to-five; you need a one-to-one ratio to help evacuate and take care of that population,” he said.
“The biggest problem is people are gonna die”
Attorney Jim Wilkes has sued nursing homes and assisted living facilities on behalf of thousands of clients.
“Every time they have to move them for transfer, they put themselves, staff, and everybody else at risk,” he said.
Wilkes says getting patients out of harm’s way may keep them from drowning, but it can have other serious consequences.
“They call them medical buses, but they’re not staying in the same environment. Nobody's in there looking to make sure these people are turned and repositioned or that they’re eating timely,” Wilkes said.
The I-Team analyzed Florida Department of Health and Florida Department of Emergency Management data to identify 77 nursing homes and assisted living centers in Citrus, Hernando, Pasco, Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee, and Sarasota Counties, which are in evacuation zone A. Those facilities are licensed for 5,882 beds.
Those facilities can be seen in the map below:
Wilkes believes the state should require operators to move facilities out of evacuation zone A to minimize the risk of having to evacuate them repeatedly.
“The biggest problem with it is that people are gonna die. People are gonna suffer from injuries that take away what quality of life that they have,” Wilkes said.
