

Why Boston's Hospitals Were Ready - dshankar
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/04/why-bostons-hospitals-were-ready.html

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ja27
In Tampa, we run annual mass casualty drills. One part is a field exercise
where fire rescue practice triage and transportation of a large number of
patients. They usually use high school students, often with makeup for their
injuries. I've been at a few of those and it's pretty creepy to see a mock
disaster like that at the airport or in a sports arena.

They also simultaneously have an exercises with all of the local hospitals and
other medical facilities. They all run their disaster plans and practice
triage, reporting available surgical beds / trauma units, etc. The bigger
hospitals actually handle some of the mock patients from the scene, but even
small day surgery facilities take part in at least a paper exercise, since
they could be tremendously useful in a real event.

Here's a decent news report about last year's drill here:
[http://www.abcactionnews.com/dpp/news/health/hospital-
staff-...](http://www.abcactionnews.com/dpp/news/health/hospital-staff-
prepares-for-worst-case-scenario-during-republican-national-convention-rnc)

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hga
Much the same happened when the Joplin, MO tornado hit a couple of years ago,
e.g. [http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-
mode-...](http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-
may-22-2011-joplin.html) (warning, a front line account with some ugly events
and outcomes) and many more stories.

E.g. at the other end of the scale, at the opposite end of tow is the local
college with has a nursing program ... and for some inexplicable reason every
bed in every room is fully functional once you remove the training dummy (12
to 20 or so). A pharmacist and some junior associates shows up from fairly far
south of the city and set up a pharmacy. It was discovered that dental chairs
for that training program were rather good for setting bones. Etc.

Or something closer to home: there's a state association of structural
engineers, which had a plan for this sort of thing, and marshalled over a
hundred to get the not so destroyed buildings graded in a very short time (as
in "safe" to "stay out").

