Floodwater seeped through the front door of the New Richland Care Center in Minnesota just before sunrise on September 19. Staff members rushed to move 36 residents out of the building while they still could, pushing elderly residents in wheelchairs through 4-inch-deep water to buses waiting in the parking lot.
According to nursing home administrator Robert Johannsen, inches turned to feet as the last three residents were wheeled out on hospital beds, lifted “as high as they can go” to escape the rising water. Firefighters and volunteers from a high school football team pushed the beds to safety across the street.
Johannsen described the now-shuttered nursing home as “pretty devastating,” with at least 2½ feet of water flowing down the hallways. The small-town, government-run nursing home is about 100 yards from a drainage ditch in southern Minnesota and has flooded three times in 16 years.
New Richland is one of 100 U.S. nursing homes that face some of the nation’s worst flood risk, according to a KFF Health News analysis of peer-reviewed flood hazard mapping provided by Fathom, a United Kingdom-based company. Fathom’s data predicted that a 100-year flood event could bring at least 2 feet of water to these buildings.
Flood Risk and Vulnerable Residents
The U.S. has nearly 15,000 nursing homes housing more than 1.2 million people, many of whom are medically frail, cognitively impaired, or immobile. David Dosa, the head of geriatrics at the UMass Chan Medical School, noted that many nursing homes were built near coastlines or waterways in the 1970s, before widespread concern about climate change.
Dosa has studied nursing home evacuations since Hurricane Katrina flooded the New Orleans area in 2005, which resulted in dozens of deaths in facilities that tried to ride out the storm. He said that while the nursing home industry has changed its approach toward evacuations, these decisions can also lead to deaths, making it a difficult choice for administrators.
A peer-reviewed study Dosa co-wrote in 2011 found that more than 270 nursing home evacuations were recorded in preparation for the next three Gulf hurricanes, resulting in a cumulative total of 277 more nursing home resident deaths than expected within 30 days.
Oliver Wing, the chief scientific officer at Fathom, emphasized that every community across the United States carries some level of flood risk, and that the reality is that anywhere rain can fall, it can flood. He noted that storms are drenching regions once considered at lower risk for flooding, where essential facilities and entire communities might be less prepared.
Some of these nursing homes have flooded in the past five years, including facilities in Florida, Kentucky, Texas, and Washington.
Climate Change and Flood Risk
Climate scientists largely agree that extreme weather is worsening as the planet warms, which allows the atmosphere to hold more moisture and causes sea levels to rise. Drew Gronewold, a University of Michigan climate scientist, said that storms are now less frequent but becoming more powerful, and that “storm tracks are changing their trajectory.”
The New Richland Care Center is a prime example, having been evacuated due to flooding in 2010 and 2016, then partially surrounded by floodwater in 2023, before the September 19 evacuation.
According to National Weather Service meteorologist Brennan Dettmann, storms dropped 4 to 8 inches of rain on much of southeastern Minnesota the day before the evacuation, setting off widespread flooding. The rainfall was heavy for September but would not have been out of place in July, he said.
Wing said that the danger should have been obvious, given that the farmland around New Richland funnels runoff into creeks and ditches that lead to a low-lying bowl near the nursing home. He emphasized that the choice has been made to prioritize crop fields over the safety of vulnerable people, saying “that’s the choice that has been made, politically, in that part of Minnesota.”
The nursing home administrator, Johannsen, said that the nursing home will be closed for five months to a year for repairs, and that all its residents were moved into a school gymnasium and have been resettled across about nine area nursing homes.
