Four Years After Flash Flood, Norwood Hospital Site Sits as Unfinished Shell-September 23, 2024

More than four years after a devastating flash flood destroyed its electrical room and forced the emergency evacuation of approximately 90 patients, Norwood Hospital remains an empty steel structure while its parent company, Steward Health Care, collapses into bankruptcy.

The Aftermath of the 2020 Flood and Steward’s Collapse

The June 28, 2020, flood cut power to the century-old facility and eliminated its 215 beds, severely straining the regional healthcare infrastructure and forcing ambulances to transport patients to facilities in Needham and Boston. While Steward initially launched a $375 million rebuilding project after demolishing the condemned structure, construction stalled when the company stopped paying its bills.

Steward’s broader collapse led to the shuttering of two Massachusetts hospitals—Carney in Dorchester and Nashoba Valley in Ayer—at the end of August, while others like St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton were steered toward new ownership. Because Norwood Hospital is closed, it was excluded from Steward’s portfolio sales. Steward’s operating license expires on November 5, and the company has abandoned the project, turning its future over to Medical Properties Trust (MPT), an Alabama-based investment firm that bought Steward’s hospital real estate nationwide in 2016.

Summer Construction and the Search for a New Operator

Although MPT funded summer work by Suffolk Construction to make the Washington Street building weathertight ahead of winter—installing a roof, a heating and cooling system, windows, and metal panels—completing the multi-million-dollar reconstruction requires finding a new hospital operator. Suffolk executive vice president Jason Seaburg estimated that between design, construction, and permitting, reopening is likely at least two years away.

Local officials and lawmakers remain steadfast in their belief that the hospital will eventually return:

• Town General Manager Tony Mazzucco: Expressed confidence that regional healthcare demands will dictate the hospital’s return, stating, “It’s just a matter of time.”
• State Representative John Rogers and State Senator Michael Rush: Pursued legislative amendments to encourage acquisition by major health systems such as Mass General Brigham and UMass Memorial Health Care, though representatives from both systems stated they were not seeking to operate the facility.
• Community Impact: Local business and civic leaders, including Tom O’Rourke of the Neponset River Regional Chamber and Sandi Guarino of Guarino Pastry Shop, emphasized the severe economic and community toll the four-year closure has inflicted on the town of 31,000 residents and surrounding communities.

While MPT has been actively marketing the property nationwide, prospective buyers face financial hurdles, including the capital required to finish construction and the necessity of paying rent to a landlord in a market where competing hospital systems typically own their real estate. Beyond these baseline economic hurdles, community leaders, municipal officials, local first responders, and regional business owners throughout Norfolk County and the greater Boston metropolitan area have continuously voiced deep-seated frustrations regarding the protracted delays, urging sweeping governmental intervention to cut through bureaucratic standstills, resolve ownership disputes, and guarantee the immediate restoration of fully functioning 24-hour acute care and emergency department services for tens of thousands of local residents who have long suffered from compromised healthcare access.

Archival Note: This article has been dynamically reconstructed from the original public record print archives of the Boston Globe