Hurricane Dorian Updates: Florida to North Carolina Under Storm Surge Threat

Protecting Florida’s older residents has been a priority.

As the outer bands of Hurricane Dorian began lashing the Florida coast on Tuesday, a woman raced to pick up her mother-in-law at a retirement community, where the elevator was about to be shut down. The staff of a nursing home packed up more than 200 residents, as well as the supplies they might need: cases of water, air mattresses and board games. At another center, residents were evacuated in specialty ambulances, rented motor coaches and private vehicles.

Across the state, a scramble was underway to move older Floridians to safer ground as a weakened but still dangerous Hurricane Dorian threatened the state’s Atlantic coast.

The last major storm to hit the state was foremost in officials’ minds. When Hurricane Irma came ashore two years ago, a dozen patients died after a nursing home in Hollywood, Fla., lost air-conditioning. The tragedy prompted new regulations and an acknowledgment that evacuation orders were not enough to protect the state’s large older population. No state has more retirees than Florida, where they make up one-fifth of the population, according to the AARP.

[Read more about how Florida has prepared its older residents for Hurricane Dorian.]

A new state law requires backup generators and enough fuel to maintain comfortable temperatures at nursing homes and assisted living centers, a mandate first tested last year, when Hurricane Michael struck the Florida Panhandle. Last week, four nursing home workers were charged in the Hurricane Irma deaths, which were ruled homicides.

Some 190,000 people live in Florida nursing homes and assisted living centers, most of them in the state’s southeastern tip. Patrick Manderfield, a spokesman for the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration, said on Monday that all but 42 of the state’s 3,062 licensed assisted living centers had an on-site generator. Five centers had emergency plans to evacuate “if needed,” he said in an email.

Nursing homes, which tend to be larger and have more beds than assisted living centers, are a different story. Reuters reported on Friday that some nursing homes were still waiting for temporary generators, though a state website suggested that they might have all been supplied by Monday afternoon. The Miami Herald reported last week that nearly 60 percent of the state’s 687 nursing homes did not yet have enough power backup.