The Texas Medical Center appears as a precedent for the danger of locating hospital emergency-power equipment below flood level. After Tropical Storm Allison flooded Houston in 2001, hospitals in the complex lost power because generators or associated electrical components were vulnerable to inundation. The episode helped make a known infrastructure risk concrete: a hospital could lose power not only when ordinary service failed, but when its backup system was itself exposed to flooding.

The Houston Precedent

The book identifies the Texas Medical Center as the nation’s largest medical complex and recalls the power losses there during Tropical Storm Allison. The failure involved equipment placement: emergency generators, or electrical components needed for them to function, were below flood level. The account does not describe a single uniform failure across every hospital in the complex; it presents the episode as evidence that floodwater could disable hospital backup power through more than one vulnerable component.

A Warning Carried to New Orleans

The 2001 incident alarmed New Orleans health director Dr. Kevin Stephens. The following year, he surveyed representatives of every hospital in the city about whether their facilities could withstand fifteen feet of water, what it would cost to elevate generators, and whether federal funding might help pay for improvements. One letter went to Susan Mulderick, who chaired Memorial Medical Center’s emergency committee. The inquiry translated the Houston precedent into a specific question for New Orleans: whether hospitals had protected their power systems against the flood conditions that had already caused failures elsewhere.

The Unfinished Lesson

The hospitals’ responses were unenthusiastic. Elevating equipment could cost more than they had available—millions of dollars in at least one case—and the initiative went no further. On the day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, federal emergency officials were told that all but two New Orleans hospitals had generators, electrical switches, or both at ground level; Memorial Medical Center was among them. In the book’s account, the Texas Medical Center thus functions as an earlier warning whose practical lesson was recognized but not converted into broad local preparedness.