A special medical unit set up to move fast in case of a terrorist attack is being put to its first test in caring for victims of Hurricane Katrina.
While U.S. government teams set up field hospitals in Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida, private clinics absorbed as many patients as possible and big university hospitals sent newly designed mobile units to the region.
One mobile medical team set up after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington is operating for the first time, setting up in Jackson, Mississippi to help evacuees.
The Duke Regional Advisory Committee’s State Medical Assistance Team is a mobile trauma center with 100 beds and nine specialists loaded onto 20 trucks.
It carries enough intravenous fluid, antibiotics, bandages and other equipment to remain in operation for 72 hours straight without resupplying.
“They were doing this, thinking of terrorism,” said Christopher DiFrancesco, a spokesman for Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina.
“So they have this beautiful state-of-the-art thing.”
The nurses, paramedics and pharmacists are trained to cope with emergencies, but those already wading into the disaster said no one was ready for the sheer enormity of it.
“This is a catastrophe of proportions that I have never seen before,” said Dr. Jonathan Weisul, vice president of medical affairs for the CHRISTUS St. Frances Cabrini Hospital, a community hospital in Alexandria, Louisiana.
“The recovery from a disaster of this magnitude is measured in months, not weeks,” Weisul, a veteran of earthquake and hurricane recovery efforts, said in a telephone interview.
The hospital, three hours north of New Orleans by truck or an hour by helicopter, is a first stop for many of the sick and injured being evacuated from New Orleans.
The hospital itself was full to capacity with 220 patients, he said, and was acting as a triage point to send incoming patients elsewhere.
Triage center
Weisul, an emergency medical physician by training, served as triage officer for four busloads of patients who came in. ”One had died on the transport up from New Orleans,” he said.
But he was surprised by the resilience of the rest, although they are in “poor condition,” he said.
“They are not as acutely ill as one might expect,” he added -- but said this is probably because the really sick and badly injured have already died.
“Certainly the stress, physiological as well as emotional, could lead to the demise of someone who would have had more time on this Earth,” he said.
“The ones we are getting have been everything from acute injuries with lacerations and fractures to transfers from chronic care facilities.” Many who were trapped on rooftops for days are dehydrated and sunburned, he said.
They are being scrubbed down as soon as they come in -- and there are fears the water many waded in was contaminated with toxic chemicals and gasoline.
Weisul disagrees with the many complaints about the rescue effort. “Everyone is making a maximum effort to get people out of harm’s way,” he said.
“I have been involved in responding to several disasters going back to Hurricane Andrew. This is the best disaster organization I have ever witnessed.”
The Health and Human Services Department said a 250-bed unit is up and running at the Louisiana State University campus in Baton Rouge. An HHS spokeswoman said 2,500 more beds were being installed at Fort Polk in central Louisiana; the Mississippi Air National Guard Station in Jackson and another in Meridian and Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola, Florida.
HHS appealed for more medical volunteers but warned of ”12-hour shifts, austere conditions (possibly no showers, housing in tents), no air conditioning, long periods of standing,” and, of course, no pay.
