The many impacts of flooding on health and institutions

The aftermath of Hurricane Helene dumped record amounts of rainfall in western North Carolina. Flooding wreaked havoc on roads, homes, and businesses. In Asheville, it also overwhelmed the city’s water system. WFDD’s David Ford spoke with infectious disease expert Dr. Christopher Ohl about the wide-ranging impacts of flooding on water availability for individuals and institutions, the strain that flooding in western North Carolina has placed on hospitals and patients, and how to best prepare for the extreme weather events of the future.

Interview Highlights

On how to stay healthy during major flooding events:

"I really understand western North Carolina probably didn't think that they would ever be affected like this from a hurricane, and that makes sense, but it's good to be prepared and have some stuff around the house. You know ... fill your bathtub full of water, so that you have water to use, at least to flush toilets and have some jugs for drinking. Have some food and canned food. Once the disaster's happened, the big thing is finding water. Try to stay clean the best you can, keeping your hands really clean, particularly before eating, after using the bathroom and so on. You know, if there's respiratory illnesses going around, you can still find a mask somewhere. You can get vaccinated for the flu, you can get vaccinated for COVID. And for some people, it might be easier to leave and go stay with friends or relatives in a place that where the infrastructure wasn't affected, at least till the power and water come back."

On the psychological impacts of floods:

"You know, actually, the mental health impact of flooding is probably, in the long run, the biggest because it lasts for a long time. In fact, some people never get over it totally. So there's a lot of different things you can see. The first one is sort of the dealing with grief because you've lost something — you've lost your home, you lost your car, hopefully, you didn't lose a loved one, your pets. And so you go through a grieving process with anger, depression, and then eventually recovery from that. But also post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. People think of PTSD with wartime, but really any kind of trauma, and having a flooding event is trauma. Anxiety comes up — people who, before would blow off a rainstorm in the middle of the night, now, every time it rains, they start panicking, get panic attacks, anxiety from it. Long-term depression, suicide goes up in people that have been affected by flooding. So providing those mental health services is important."

On Asheville's water distribution system:

"It was an aging infrastructure to begin with, and they were having a lot of problems with leaks over the last decade or so. And so they put in a backup system of water mains and such to bypass some of these and to create some redundancy in their water distribution. Well, two things happened with this event. One is the whole water treatment plant got submerged because obviously we use riverine water a lot of times, or well waters, and those are usually in lower areas. And then the distribution system got taken out. I mean, the flooding was so intense that it washed out the roads. And where are the water mains? They're under the roads. And if a bridge goes down, a lot of the mains cross the rivers under the bridge. And so they lost a lot of their water distribution system, and the redundancy, the backup system, got lost at the same time the main system did, and that's what they're wrestling with now."

On water's many important uses:

"You need to drink water to stay hydrated. You need water to bathe and stay clean. You need water to flush toilets for the sanitation end of things, but there's a lot of things people don't realize that we need water for. For instance, for cooling. Like hospitals, all of their CT scans, a lot of their big equipment, a lot of the communication gear is all water-cooled. So if you don't have water pressure, you can't do that. Schools have to have a lot of water to operate. So if the water system's out, even though the school building really was undamaged, you can't bring kids back to go to school. And once a water infrastructure system is devastated, it takes a long time to restore it, whereas power can be done more quickly. Water takes longer."