Cheryl Bettigole, executive director of the Penn Center for Public Health and former health commissioner of Philadelphia, discusses the many ways communities are affected by floods.
3 min. read
Image: Philippe Gerber via Getty Images
Floods are destructive natural disasters that can wreak havoc on a community, causing physical damage, mental distress, and economic calamity.
Cheryl Bettigole, executive director of the Penn Center for Public Health and a professor of clinical family medicine and community health at the Perelman School of Medicine, says the most urgent risks at the onset of a flood are drowning, electrocution, or other injuries that can occur when people are in or near the water.
“Also, people often may have to leave their homes very suddenly, so there can be displacements,” she says. “There may be people who are unhoused or who have to be somewhere other than their usual environment because of the flood, so we worry about access to medications, access to food, adequate ventilation, as well as the mental health impacts.”
To learn more about disease risk, mental health concerns, and long-term hazards from floods, Penn Today spoke with Bettigole, who has a secondary appointment as professor of medical ethics and health policy and served as the heath commissioner for the City of Philadelphia’s Department of Public Health.
You were health commissioner during the 2021 Hurricane Ida flood. What do you recall about the experience?
What I remember most is probably what most Philadelphians remember most: the guy jumping into the water with an inner tube on I-676 (we don’t recommend that). But a lot of what happened was what was supposed to happen, which is the teams from the city following through and helping people to get out of their homes if they needed to get out, and helping to support them for as long as they needed to be out. The city’s emergency management and preparedness people were helping with the pandemic, they were managing the massive influx of Afghani evacuees through the airport—which was where I was when that flood hit—and they were managing the flood.
Fortunately, there are folks who work for these agencies who have a set of responses that they’re used to doing. When there’s a big flood in Philadelphia, there are sites that city officials open up as emergency shelters, and they know in advance where those are, and they have a plan in advance for how they’re going to manage that; how they’re going to manage emergency access to medical care, how they’re going to manage getting people where they need to go. A lot of what’s really important in the public health piece is having those response plans ready to go so that you’re not scrambling.
Are water-borne diseases a concern during a flood?
Contamination of drinking water through sewage contamination is more commonly a concern in places where people have well water. In a place like Philadelphia, however, the water is treated, so the Water Department would issue a warning if there was such a problem.
For floods, we generally have to assume that water is contaminated, so if somebody has a cut, for example, and gets sewage-contaminated water onto it, we want to get that cleaned up as soon as possible. That’s a risk for infection.
And as flood waters recede, we tend to have pooling of water in various areas. It doesn’t take very much water for mosquitos to grow. Philadelphia is a very warm climate, so you worry about mosquito-borne disease.
What advice would you give to the public to stay safe during a flood?
It’s really about what people do in advance: signing up for emergency alerts; having an emergency pack so if they need to get out of their house quickly, they can grab medication and anything they would need; having a plan of a place to meet.
And then all of the things that you hear repeatedly when there’s an event like this: don’t drive into moving water, get to high land, pay attention to alerts, and making sure that people are not putting themselves into a situation where somebody else has to rescue them. It’s also important that we check on elderly neighbors and others who may have trouble getting themselves to safety.
What are some long-term health hazards after the waters recede?
One of big ones is it can take a long time for people to get insurance payments to help restore homes that have been damaged, so sometimes they’ll try to do the work themselves and that can be dangerous. Sometimes people end up in a situation where they can’t return to their home and they can’t afford other housing, so there may be a rise in homelessness related to these kinds of events, and the fact that they’ve been happening more often.
If they do return home, we worry about exposures once the building has been sitting for a while. If people try to go back into water-damaged homes, they may be exposed to molds that can trigger asthma and other kinds of breathing problems.
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