Ten newborns in intensive care have been evacuated by plane from the path of Hurricane Harvey as the storm bears down on the Texas coast.
Flight crews worked for 18 hours straight on Thursday and Friday transporting the infants from the NICU at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Corpus Christi to Cook Children’s in Fort Worth.
All of the babies were born in the past few weeks and are ‘critically ill’, officials said.
The evacuation of the medically fragile infants came as Harvey threatened massive storm surges and more than 35 inches of rain that are expected to devastate coastal areas.
Ten critically ill babies were evacuated by air from a hospital in Corpus Christi
The infants were all born in the past few weeks and are ‘critically ill’, officials said
Corpus Christi was expected to inundated with ‘devastating’ rain and storm surges
Flight crews worked through the night shuttling the critically ill infants out of harm’s way on four different planes.
‘Because of the extraordinary nature of the hurricane and the transport teams working together, these babies arrived in a dramatic way to our NICU,’ Register Nurse Sheralyn Hartline, director of the NICU at Cook Children’s, said in a statement.
‘Our physicians, nurses and everyone who works in the NICU are all prepared and trained for occasions exactly like this one. Every day, they are treating the sickest children with the most difficult and complex diagnoses,’ Hartline said.
The National Weather Service on Friday morning urged that preparations for Harvey should be ‘rushed to completion’ adding that ‘conditions are expected to deteriorate throughout the day’.
Crews unload one of the infants after transport from Corpus Christi to Fort Worth
The four planes shuttled back and forth through the night to complete the evacuation
Cook Children’s in Fort Worth took over care of the infants from a hospital in the storm track
Eight million Texans are under hurricane warnings, with an additional one million under tropical storm warnings, as landfall quickly approaches for what could be the most powerful hurricane to hit the US in 12 years.
‘Now is the time to urgently hide from the wind,’ the NWS said in a flash bulletin on Friday. ‘Failure to adequately shelter may result in serious injury, loss of life, or immense human suffering.’
Forecasters labeled Harvey a ‘life-threatening storm’ that posed a ‘grave risk,’ saying it could swamp several counties more than 100 miles inland and projecting it will wallop the coast not once but twice in the next week.
Sharp winds and rain had already begun to batter the coast Friday morning, with landfall predicted east of Corpus Christi sometime between 10pm Friday and 2am Saturday.
The National Hurricane Center’s official five-day forecast Friday has Harvey slamming the central Texas coast, stalling and letting loose with lots of rain.
Then forecasters project the weakened but still tropical storm is likely to go back into the Gulf of Mexico, gain some strength and hit Houston next week, meaning the storm could wallop the Texas coast twice in a row.
Throughout the Texas coast, millions of people were bracing for a prolonged battering from the hurricane, which could be the fiercest such storm to hit the US in nearly a dozen years.
Forecasters labeled Harvey a ‘life-threatening storm’ that posed a ‘grave risk,’ saying it could swamp several counties more than 100 miles inland