Hospital reviews its work on train wreck

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University Hospital board members got a quick snapshot of the medical center's response to the Graniteville train wreck Thursday, a summary that underscored the value of disaster drills.

About a half-hour after the early-morning Jan. 6 wreck, hospital officials were told to expect a wave of patients needing medical treatment and decontamination from tons of deadly chlorine escaping a ruptured tank car.

Activating their emergency response plan, hospital officials asked the 300-person night shift to stay on duty and made an early call-in to an equal number of day-shift employees, said Jason Moore, the hospital's chief operating officer.

More than 25 doctors were also summoned, and administrators started scrambling for extra space - delaying morning surgeries, eyeing an auditorium for service as a makeshift ward and taking inventory of 340 patients to see who could be moved.

They also deployed a three-bay decontamination unit received just two weeks before the train wreck, which the hospital's physical plant manager provided with warm water to shower off the lethal chemical. Nurses and aides in the decontamination unit donned yellow hazardous material suits.

Mr. Moore compared the hospital's emergency response to the controlled chaos of a mobile Army surgical hospital.

"There's a lot more to this than throwing a lot of people together and a lot of supplies," Mr. Moore said. "It was similar to a MASH unit - we improvised, we adapted and we overcame."

Mr. Moore said the hospital is still tallying the cost of muscling up to meet the disaster.

All told, University Hospital treated 211 people, Mr. Moore said, more than any other medical facility in the Augusta-Aiken area.

On the day of the wreck, 107 people were treated by the emergency department and 19 were admitted, including four who received critical care.

At one point during the day of the wreck, disaster officials considered shutting down Aiken Regional Medical Centers because of its proximity to the wreck site and an estimated 220 tons of chlorine on damaged rail cars.

That would have required the transfer of more than 160 patients, Mr. Moore said. While considering the use of an auditorium as a temporary ward, hospital officials realized that the key to a storage room for surplus beds was missing.

In other action, the board approved a year-end financial report that showed the hospital turned a $22.9 million profit in 2004 - $1.6 million more than projected.

The board also approved spending $2.4 million for a new magnetic resonance imaging machine and upgrading of an existing machine.

It also approved spending $1.6 million for the purchase of a two-story building on the corner of Walton Way and St. Sebastian Way that once housed the main laboratory for Mullins Laboratories. Hospital officials plan to move a credit union and the medical center's human resources department to that building.

Reach Jim Nesbitt at (706) 828-3904 or jim.nesbitt@augustachronicle.com.

Special Section: Graniteville Train Wreck

On January 6, 2005, a Norfolk Southern Corp. freight train carrying chemicals hit a parked train near an Avondale Mills plant in Graniteville, South Carolina. The impact caused poisonous chlorine gas to leak from three of the moving train's cars. Nine people were killed and more than 5,000 people were evacuated from the site.

For complete coverage of the Graniteville train wreck, visit our special section.

--From the Friday, January 28, 2005 printed edition of the Augusta Chronicle