Facing what could be months without a steady water supply, the only solution for Mission Hospital was to dig a well. The Asheville, North Carolina hospital was crippled after the fast-moving Hurricane Helene dumped a record amount of rain in the region over the weekend. “The entire water infrastructure to the area was obliterated,” said Hannah Drummond, a nurse at the hospital and the chief nurse representative for National Nurses United, the union that represents nurses at Mission Hospital.
The sewage system was so backed up after the storm, Drummond said, that it wasn’t possible to flush toilets . “We were pooping in bags and buckets,” she said. Access to clean water was also wiped out.
Patients were showing up to the hospital drenched in flood water saturated with gasoline, chemicals and other unknown toxins. Those people would normally be placed in a shower to clean off, Drummond said. Not so after Helene barreled through, knocking out the basics of hygiene.
“It’s been really difficult to do decontamination,” Drummond said. Her team, she said, was forced to fill trash cans with whatever clean water they could find to dump over patients in an effort to rinse them. Follow live updates on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene “I feel like I am in the middle of living a nightmare,” she said.
At one point, Drummond said, the hospital’s emergency department was double its usual capacity, packed with 200 patients in a facility meant for 100. Food was scarce. �.