At least 170 US hospitals face major flood risk. Experts say Trump is making it worse – Twin Cities

By Holly K. Hacker, Brett Kelman, Daniel Chang, Hannah Norman Lydia Zuraw, KFF Health News

LOUISVILLE, Tenn. — When a big storm hits, Peninsula Hospital could be underwater.

At this decades-old psychiatric hospital on the edge of the Tennessee River, an intense storm could submerge the building in 11 feet of water, cutting off all roads around the facility, according to a sophisticated computer simulation of flood risk.

Aurora, a young woman who was committed to Peninsula as a teenager, said the hospital sits so close to the river that it felt like a moat keeping her and dozens of other patients inside. KFF Health News agreed not to publish her full name because she shared private medical history.

“My first feeling is doom,” Aurora said as she watched the simulation of the river rising around the hospital. “These are probably some of the most vulnerable people.”

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.

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 a months-long KFF Health News investigation based on data provided by Fathom, a company considered a leader in flood simulation. At many of these hospitals, flooding from heavy storms has the potential to jeopardize patient care, block access to emergency rooms, and force evacuations. Sometimes there is no other hospital nearby.

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as the nation’s de facto tool for flood estimation for half a century, despite being incomplete and sometimes decades out of date.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?”

The deadliest hospital flooding in modern American history occurred 20 years ago during Hurricane Katrina, when the bodies of 45 people were recovered from New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center, including some patients whom investigators suspected were euthanized. More flooding deaths were narrowly avoided one year ago when helicopters rescued dozens of people as Hurricane Helene engulfed Unicoi County Hospital in Erwin, Tennessee.

Rebecca Harrison, a paramedic, called her children from the Unicoi roof to say goodbye.

“I was scared to death, thinking, ‘This is it,’” Harrison told CBS News, which interviewed Unicoi survivors as part of KFF Health News’ investigation. “Alarms were going off. People were screaming. It was chaos.”

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. Spokesperson Daniel Llargués defended the administration’s changes to FEMA by reissuing an August statement that dismissed criticism as coming from “bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency.”

Alice Hill, an Obama administration climate risk expert, said the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate change and worsening floods would waste billions of dollars and endanger lives.

In 2015, Hill 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.”

‘Flood Risk Is Everywhere’

The KFF Health News investigation identified more than 170 hospitals facing a flood risk by comparing the locations of more than 7,000 facilities to peer-reviewed flood hazard mapping provided by Fathom, a United Kingdom company that simulates flooding in spaces as small as 10 meters using laser-precision elevation measurements from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Hospitals were determined to have a significant risk if Fathom’s 100-year flood data predicted that a foot or more of water could reach a considerable portion of their buildings, excluding parking garages, or cut off road access to the hospital. A 100-year flood is an intense weather event that has roughly a 1% chance of occurring in any given year but can happen more often.

Shanen Wright, 48, a lifelong Charleston resident who lives near CAMC Memorial, said many in the city have little worry about flooding in the face of more immediate problems, like the opioid epidemic and the decline of manufacturing and mining.

Tugboats and coal barges sail past his neighborhood as if they were cars on his street.

“It’s not to say it’s not a possibility,” he said. “I’m sure the people in Asheville and the people in Texas, where the floods took so many lives, they probably didn’t see it coming either.”

‘The Water Is Coming’

Despite wide scientific consensus that climate change fuels more dangerous weather, the Trump administration has taken the position that concerns about global warming are overblown. In a speech to the United Nations in September, Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

The Trump administration has made deep staff and funding cuts to FEMA, NOAA, and the National Weather Service. At FEMA, the cuts prompted 191 current and former employees to publish a letter in August warning that the agency is being dismantled from within.

Daniel Swain, a University of California climate scientist, said the administration’s rejection of climate change has left the nation less prepared for extreme weather, now and in the future.

“It’s akin to enforcing malpractice scientifically,” Swain said. “Imagine making a medical decision where you are not allowed to look at 20% of the patient’s vital signs or test results.”

Under Trump, FEMA has also taken actions critics say will leave the nation more vulnerable to flooding, specifically:

• FEMA disbanded the Technical Mapping Advisory Council, which had repeatedly pushed the agency to modernize its flood maps to estimate future risk and account for the impacts of climate change.
• FEMA canceled its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which provided grants to help communities and vital buildings, including hospitals, protect themselves from floods and other natural disasters.
• And after stopping enforcement early this year, FEMA intends to rescind the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which was designed to harden buildings against future floods and save tax dollars in the long run.

Berginnis, of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said the administration’s unwillingness to prepare for climate change and worsening storms would result in a dangerous and costly cycle of flooding, rebuilding, and flooding again.

“The president is saying we are closed for business when it comes to hazard mitigation,” Berginnis said. “It bugs me to no end that we have to have reminders — like people dying — to show us why it’s important to make these investments.”

FEMA did not answer specific questions about these decisions. In the statement to KFF Health News, spokesperson Llargués touted the administration’s response to flooding in Texas and New Mexico and said FEMA had provided billions of dollars to help people and communities recover and rebuild. He did not mention any FEMA funding for protecting against future floods.

Few hospitals understand this threat more than the former Coney Island Hospital in New York City, which has suffered catastrophic flooding before and has prepared for it to come again.

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 forced the hospital to evacuate hundreds of patients. When the water receded, fish and a sea turtle were found in the building.

Eleven years later, the facility reopened as Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospital, transformed by a FEMA-funded $923 million reconstruction project that added a 4-foot floodwall and elevated patient care areas and utility infrastructure above the first floor.

It is now likely one of the most flood-proofed hospitals in the nation.

But, so far, no storm has tested the facility.

Svetlana Lipyanskaya, CEO of NYC Health+Hospitals/South Brooklyn Health, which includes the rebuilt hospital, said the question of flooding is “not an if but a when.”

“I hope it doesn’t happen in my lifetime,” she said, “but frankly, I’d be surprised. The water is coming.”

Methodology

After Hurricane Helene made landfall a year ago, a raging river flooded a rural hospital in eastern Tennessee. Patients and employees were rescued from the rooftop. Floods have hit hospitals from New York to Nebraska to Texas in recent years. We wanted to determine how many other U.S. hospitals face similar peril. Ultimately, we found more than 170 hospitals at risk.

For this analysis, we used data from Fathom, a United Kingdom-based company that specializes in flood-risk modeling across the globe. To assess the United States’ vulnerability, Fathom uses sophisticated computer simulations and detailed terrain data covering the country. It accounts for environmental factors such as climate change, soil conditions, and many rivers and creeks not mapped by other sources. Fathom’s modeling has been peer-reviewed and used by insurance companies, the World Bank, the Nature Conservancy, and government agencies in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. The Iowa Flood Center has validated Fathom’s U.S. data.

Through a data use agreement, Fathom shared its U.S. mapping data that predicts areas with at least a 1% chance of flooding in any given year. Fathom’s data estimates the effects of three main types of flooding: coastal, fluvial (from overflowing rivers, lakes, or streams), and pluvial (rainfall that the ground can’t absorb). The data also accounts for dams, reservoirs, and other structures that defend against floods.

To identify at-risk hospitals, we used a publicly available Department of Homeland Security database containing the GPS coordinates of more than 7,000 short-term acute, critical access, rehab, and psychiatric hospitals — basically any hospital with inpatient services. (DHS under the Trump administration has discontinued public access to the database, so data for hospitals and other infrastructure is no longer widely available.)

Using GPS coordinates as the centerpoint, we created a circle with a 150-yard radius around each hospital, which in most cases captured the building plus nearby grounds and access roads. We then mapped Fathom’s flood-risk data to see where it overlapped with these circles. We started by looking for hospitals where at least 20% of the circle’s area had a predicted flood depth of at least 1 foot. That gave us an initial list of more than 320 hospitals across the U.S.

From there, we visually inspected those hospitals using mapping software and Google Maps, both satellite and street view. We trimmed our list to only the hospitals where a considerable portion of the building or all access roads were predicted to have at least a foot of flooding.

If two hospitals were mapped to the same building — for instance, a small rehab facility within a large hospital — we counted only one hospital. We also excluded hospitals recently converted to nursing homes or for other uses.

We ended up with a list of 171 hospitals across the U.S. That is most likely an undercount. Some hospitals could still face significant impact from flooding that is not deep enough or widespread enough to fit our methodology. Our analysis also does not account for how flooding farther from a hospital could affect employees or patients. And it does not assess what steps hospitals may have already taken to prepare for severe weather events.

We also ran a spatial analysis comparing Fathom’s data with flood hazard maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which in many cases are incomplete or haven’t been updated in years. We found that about a third of hospitals identified as flood risks by Fathom’s data did not overlap at all with FEMA’s 100- or 500-year hazard areas.

Fathom provided guidance and feedback as we developed our analysis.

CBS News correspondent David Schechter and photojournalist Chance Horner contributed to this report.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Originally Published: October 9, 2025 at 11:55 AM CDT