Nearly a year after a devastating explosion and fire at a Savannah-area sugar refinery, health care workers are gathering at a symposium to share what they learned.
The Joseph M. Still Burn Center at Doctors Hospital is host of the seminar Thursday and Friday in Charleston, S.C., nearly a year to the day after the Imperial Sugar Co. accident.
The 2009 Joseph M. Still Burn Symposium's theme is "Burn Disasters: Are You Ready?"
The conference will draw on the center's experiences with the Imperial Sugar Co. incident, and on its treatment of victims from the Graniteville train accident and a massive marketplace fire in Peru. It is the annual conference's third year, and coincidentally the explosion came during the opening party of last year's conference, said Fred Mullins, the medical director for the burn center.
The center received 23 of the burn victims from the sugar refinery, six of whom later died. The center is still following 11 of them, the last of whom wasn't discharged until Oct. 14.
The explosion emphasized the need for having a plan for disasters, from how supplies are organized to how the center is staffed, Dr. Mullins said. It also includes planning for the things that are out of your control, he said.
"You know that the first 30 minutes to an hour it is going to be chaos, no matter how well planned out it is," Dr. Mullins said. "So you try to get over that and then make sure that you have the staffing organized as you need to. Because right when it happens, everybody will come in."
Two to three weeks after that, when "you've really got to get down to work on the patients," having the proper staffing is critical, he said.
Even now, a year later, Dr. Mullins is doing surgeries on some of the sugar refinery patients.
"We're starting into the realm of doing some of the reconstruction with the patients," he said, "as well as just making sure they're progressing with their physical therapy."
And there has been good progress, Dr. Mullins said.
"They're doing real well," he said. "A lot of them are rebuilding their muscle, rebuilding their strength. It's coming along just as it should. Most of them were young and healthy (when it happened), so that has helped."
Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213 or tom.corwin@augustachronicle.com.
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