What a week it has been! It really began last week Thursday. It was a dark and stormy night... Well, actually evening. I was sitting at my desk in my office at the Family Care Center, working on patient charts when the power went off. I took that as a cue that it was time to pack things up. Then out of the corner of my eye I noticed water trickling onto my carpeted floor. "From whence did this water come?" I thought to myself. Shockingly, I turned behind me to find three feet of water outside my window, filling the parking lot, and covering my car up to the hood! Obviously, i wasn't going anywhere soon. As I got up to explore the clinic, I found an inch and a half if water throughout the Family care center. And now it became apparent that the waterfall-like sound that I was hearing was the sound of flood water rushing under the outside doors. The water in the FCC was rising fast. Drat!
Anyway, to make a log story short, i spent the remainder of the evening helping the neighborhood people who found their way to the second floor lobby to the old hospital. Around 11:30 pm, the North Shore Fire department made it over to our location, in order to evacuate us in rafts, and ultimately transported us to the Red Cross shelter at Glen Hills Middle School. I finally made it home after 1:00 am.
The result: the Family Care Center was ruined beyond repair, including our computers and servers, our Electronic Health Record, and most everything less than 2 feet off of the floor. Fortunately, we were already in the process of making plans to move our offices and clinic to another location in the building, so these events will likely excellerate these plans. Hopefully after this coming week, we we will be leaving our temporary home at St. Joseph Hospital , for a longer-term temporary home at the former Cancer Care Center at the old St. Michael's Hospital. Thanks to the over-the-top efforts of Ody Grandos from MCW Information services, our EHR is functioning, and a permanent server being rebuilt. All-In-all, the flash flood of 2010 has been a huge inconvenience, but nothing that we cannot survive. I'll update this blog as things develop.
