This is going to be harsh, sorry...
Not trying to be mean, but your reply to mine just restates the obvious. Nobody knew what they were doing.
People (especially managers) probably should have lost their jobs for such ignorance, incompetence, and short-sightedness. I hope they did for the benefit of future generations.
From tsunamis to earthquakes, to powerful storms, to subway bombings, the rest of the world seems to have educated themselves and prepare for disaster response.
"It never happened to us before" is not an excuse, and since there are people specifically educated, trained, and paid, to plan for and mitigate disasters. The idea that "it never happened to us before" just means that everyone had their head burried in the sand and wasn't even aware of what was going on outside of your little area. Hardly a sign of engaged pros.
It may seem like I am being overly critical, and truthfully I am. I hate small town, good old boy networks, who measure their ability by "it never happened and somehow we survived, so it must have been a good job."
It wasn't a good job. Since the 1980s it was highly publicized it will take 24-48 hours with an intactinfrastructure for federal help to arrive. You didn't know? You had no preperations? You were surprised? Where has your agency been?
Your description simply describes amateurs masquerading as professionals, or maybe even heroes.
Did they give out awards for this cluster after too?
Communications were down for a few days. It took time to deploy generators to the repeater sites. The crews had their personal and truck radios, but those weren't strong enough to reach dispatch because of the lack of repeaters.
Of course it did, backup generators prestaged for communication didn't seem important prior to a disaster?
Maybe the money was spent buying backboards?
I know this may seem like every patient found were just strapped to a backboard and transported, but there were a huge amount of high priority trauma patients.
So what? What did the backboard help with? Did it magically increase surgical capability for them? Hospital space? What made anyone think it was helping or doing anything at all?
It sounds to me they didn't know what to do so they did what they knew, even though it was pointless and may have harmed people.
Just to give you an idea 238 people died, and if thats the amount of fatalities just imagine the number of injured patients that survived. Obviously only the critical patients were immediately transported.
Sorry, that is not that much. It is probably just the largest your area ever saw. Inexperienced, unprepaired is an excuse. Who cares if you had 10,000 dead, they are dead, they require no treatment. They should not be taking up treatment resources at all. Including things like putting sheets over them.
Another issue was you'd have 20 *yellows* on scene and by the time an ambulance got through the roads (which were blocked by debris and fallen trees) half of them had progressed to red..
Again, not many at all. That is not even a busy night in many EDs I have seen that a staff of roughly 8-10 handle regularly. Did they progress to red because you lacked the ability to treat them or did they progress because you are not used to taking care of patients long term and were scared?
We have a word for people who rapidly deteriorate in a disaster, we call them "expectant."
I am also going to just guess not all of your "criticals" wound up in surgery or an ICU. Which means they were in fact, not really critical.
Unless your treatments made them that way.
(To Veneficus) At the time this happened disaster procedures were not well known by the truck crews or command. Our area had never experienced an incident on this scale...
Regretably, that is obvious.
In the beginning i was mainly speaking about the day of and after the storms when getting patients to the hospital was the big priority..
As I said, transporting to the hospital in a disaster is not a reasonable goal. It was all you knew, so it is what you did.
When you take a large disaster and transport it to the hospital, you do not help mitigate it, all you do is move it from one location to another. You know what happens to sick people in a hospital when resources run out? They die there.
Whether a person dies with no care in the rubble or dies with no care in the hospital, they still die. You don't win any awards for driving people around and wasting fuel.
Of course the the infrastructure was destroyed, that is part of disasters. It happens in all of them.
It really was amazing to see how everyone adapted to the situation. The emergency personnel did a phenomenal job at working with what they had. especially with the lack of direction everyone had.
From your description, it doesn't sound amazing, it sounds like self praise for muddling through no better than any other person who is not a "professional" responder.
On the day after the storms supplies were brought by volunteers from the supermarkets. The next day the red cross and national guard arrived further distributing supplies..
As scheduled. I am sorry you seem surprised.
Back to the EMS response. The care of *greens* were mostly taken care of on scene. Obviously the people and crews used common sense in all of this..
I can only hope with more ability than the other treatment and transport details you described.
Also the need for all the backboards were to secure the patients with possible spinal injuries. When the patients were found or pulled from the debris. Would you want somebody to sit there and hold C Spine until transport arrived? No you wouldn't, hence all the backboards so you can at least secure the patient on scene.
So you took people who were going to have delayed treatment/transport and put them on a board to help them, despite well known harmful effects of that, and ED policies around the world designed to remove people from boards as soon as possible?
You don't hold c-spine in a disaster. You let the person lay there and self splint. You don't strap people to boards that causes harm, inhibits breathing, and requires you to spend resources to monitor their airway. In a disaster, c-spine precautions are not a priority at all.
Perhaps if one vomited on that board and nobody was monitoring them and they died from a FBAO they will be very greatful you did your best to prevent secondary spinal injury.
Our state has done a fantastic job since in planning for future disasters. Including beginning the process of switching radios over to a state wide network so that multiple agencies can communicate together over the same type of network, started hands on courses that teach citizens how to react to a disaster, and started multiple public campaigns including a few days where there's no sales tax on emergency goods.
Lol, they couldn't do much worse. But it is typical to upgrade communications after a disaster, it makes it look like it will solve all the problems and the leaders know and are doing something. It is also a good PR tool, because it is hard to show off your knew knowledge but not your new electronic toys.
The rest of that is just useless fluff. Like hiding under your school desk in a nuclear attack with a burn kit.
Sorry for my curt and candid response, but like I said, this level of ignorance from those who claim to be "professional" really pisses me off. They should be embarassed everytime somebody looks up to them.
Nobody in an emergency agency should be proud of having no insight and no idea how to handle a disaster. It means they didn't know or care enough to do their job before it happened.
Especially then congratulate themselves on a job well done when they really weren't doing anything and the situation resolved itself.
Like I said, I have no mercy and no tolerance for these types of people. What were they doing instead of planning for disasters everyday? Trying to organize where they were in the next parade line-up?
We sometimes make fun of it, but every emergency organization I have ever been part of, visited, or have only ever talked online around the world plans for "the big one" both formally and informally on a regular basis.
What you described here wasn't a good job. It was garbage. Understanding that is the first step to improvement.
