Hospital safety: Texas dodged a bullet.

Hurricane Ike was just one disaster among many in 2008, a year in which 235 816 people died in such events – Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar and the Sichuan earthquake in southwestern China being the most notable. Hospital safety has been under the spotlight this year with the World Disaster Reduction Campaign, World Health Day and the International Day for Disaster Reduction on 14 October 2009 all highlighting the importance of safe hospitals during disasters. While high winds and earthquakes tend to grab the headlines, it is flooding that most frequently devastates, as has been demonstrated by the recent typhoon in the Philippines. It was flood water that wrecked the John Sealy Hospital. Wedged in among the buildings of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) on Galveston Island, the twelve-storey hospital was hit by a wall of water driven across the island by winds of up to 180 kilometres per hour in the early hours of 13 September 2008. Gushing in through doors and windows, it inundated the basement and ground floor, destroying the blood bank, sterile processing laboratory and pharmacy and taking out the electrical and ventilation systems, along with phone lines, computer systems and elevators.