Colorado Springs Emergency! May I rest in peace

American Café,

Please read this article by Michelle. This is extraordinary and should make you think about your plan. Please think about your plan and make one in advance. We have a plan in our family if disaster strikes.

Pete and Adrienne

Subject: May I rest in peace

I thought I would tell you about the mass disaster exercise I participated in on Saturday.

I arrived at 6:30 to check in at 7:00. From there I got to choose a costume or a card. Both indicated what kind of injury I had and how responsive I was. I just looked for something that fit, and didn’t notice the injuries until I put it on the pants that came ready-made with injuries. Others were looking for the “right” injury to insure them one of the Flight-for-Life trips. As it turned out, I had two injuries. A puncture wound in my left leg (a writing pen was embedded in my leg) and my right leg had the life-threatening injury, a laceration to my femoral artery. Both looked pretty bad. The woman who creates these costumes is gifted in making the injuries look very real. I got a bracelet with a number that matched my “victim” costume and that is the number they used to track me all day, everywhere I went. This is how they will eventually determine if the emergency teams processed my injuries correctly. From there they took my picture for my certificate suitable for framing, so that everybody could see that I helped with this exercise. We had a hot breakfast that was hot. That’s all I’ll say about that.

We went outside and were sprayed with blood to match the wound on our costume, or the card we picked up. Some were bruised and burned, others had clothes like mine with the injuries already on them (impaled glass, or other foreign objects). Some were “pregnant” or some a missing limb or a nearly missing limb. The sheriff came and wished us well on the exercise and told us that we were a pretty rough looking group. And we were.

There were 138 of us who boarded buses that took us to Hanover. Hanover is Greek for “the middle of freaking nowhere.” I don’t know why they built a school so far out there. Kansas would have been closer. When we boarded the buses, they took our victim ID#s. When we arrived in Hanover, two people had already gone missing, so they had to hold us on the buses while they searched for them. They found one, but the other apparently bailed out in Colorado Springs without telling anyone. So this seriously delayed the start of the exercise, because it doesn’t look good to lose “victims” before you even begin.

The school was ready for us. There were some slabs of broken concrete and something that they had blown up. There were three cars placed on their roofs. Indeed, it looked like a disaster zone.

On the buses we were already trying to figure out who had the worst injuries. Outside the school we were placed into three groups. We didn’t know it officially, but they separated us based on the seriousness of our injury, then sprinkled us throughout the building. Those in dark rooms were given glow sticks. I was placed in a semi-dark science room with a lot of seriously injured victims who couldn’t walk. I immediately placed myself under overturned desks and chairs. Others wandered around the room for a bit until we heard from someone in the hallway that the exercise was underway. We immediately started calling for help. The First Responders were from the school. God help the students if there is ever a disaster at Hanover. One shouted that I needed a tourniquet, and so did another woman whose mostly severed hand was lodged in the door. “Don’t open the door she said, or you’ll bleed to death.” Later the same people who warned the victim not to open the door, opened the door. Brilliant. So she died. They told me I needed a tourniquet, which was a great thing for me to play off of because we were left there for hours. Certainly, I would have bled to death without my tourniquet. The door kept opening and each time we assumed it was the rescue crew, but it was only a series of camera crews coming to film us for various training videos. We played it up for them and I even worked myself into tears a few times. My acting experience finally paid off. The floor was cold and hard and my tourniquet was long overdue. It was a frightening feeling that maybe nobody would ever come to find us or rescue us. What I didn’t know was that one of the camera crews was Channel 11. Hold that thought. We stayed in the science room for 2.5 hours. We never saw a rescue crew. Never. The First Responders would stop in to check on us. Their bedside manner was severely lacking. We were told to stop crying out for help, that others were hurt worse than we were. (Okay, I had a lacerated femoral artery and guy near me had a ruptured spleen…I’m thinking we were in the “pretty bad” category too.) At one point, the principal told us to “Buck up.” Nice and comforting. His counterpart told us, “You need to calm down. Your injuries are keeping you alive.” Where did they get these people? With First Responders like that, just leave us to die in peace. So 2.5 hours into the exercise, we still haven’t been found or rescued. I certainly would have died by then, my first untimely demise.

Apparently our tornado left trees in the roadway and they had to be moved before the fire trucks could get to Hanover. They had to work fast, because the trees weren’t there when we came through on buses. Hanover only had one or two fire trucks, so that was all they had to rescue us until others could come from Falcon and other cities, quite a distance away. They made it realistic in trying to get help from faraway. Meanwhile, we waited, still crying for help.

After 2.5 hours, they still hadn’t found us or rescued us. I guess they were understaffed for the emergency, so they changed their plan. We were instructed to go to the lobby of the school, even though we weren’t supposed to walk. From there, we were directed to the triage tent, and again, we walked there, when we weren’t supposed to walk anywhere. That was part of the exercise and our assignment. At the triage tent it throws them for a curve when you walk in, because that tells them you’re not that badly injured. They process the walking wounded differently than the immobile wounded. So we had to explain that we walked in, but they should pretend we were carried in.

The pen in my leg was certainly a “main attraction.” Nobody had ever seen anything like that. Sadly, this would be the cause of my second death. My wounds were bandaged, but incorrectly. I never got the pressure bandage for my artery, so if I hadn’t bled out waiting for rescue, I would bleed out on my way to the hospital. They put me on a backboard, then a gurney. Sadly, they didn’t securely strap me onto the backboard and all I could think of was the guy that had fallen off the gurney when one had malfunctioned. (Yes, and the victims in my room watched from the window while it happened.) I was feeling very slippery on that backboard, but they assured me the guy that fell off was on a faulty gurney and they knew what they were doing, because they do it every day. That’s only moderately comforting after a guy was just dropped on the ground. The triage guy misdirected me to a hospital that didn’t have Flight for Life. The ambulance attendant caught the mistake, said something twice, but was apparently outranked by the guy who decided where I should go. So I missed my helicopter ride, but I got a ride in the ambulance and a nice tour of its contents. The attendant was supposed to start an IV, but he either forgot or didn’t have enough IVs, either way it wasn’t good news for me or their score for treating me correctly.

The ambulances didn’t take us back to Colorado Springs, because it’s too many miles for them and would have deprived Colorado Springs of too many ambulances. There simply weren’t enough ambulances to handle all the victims, so many were loaded onto buses and transported out to a staging area where we would wait for the school buses to take us to the participating hospitals.

What I didn’t know is that the same Channel 11 News crew filmed me being loaded onto the ambulance, then followed me out to the staging area. So when I arrived, the NOAA staff said that the press was requesting an interview with me and would I grant one. So they interviewed me and then left. No pressure there. I just hoped I didn’t say something stupid.

The backboard became my responsibility and they assigned a nice young man to tote it for me and load it onto my bus. I was now on my way to Memorial North hospital in Colorado Springs, on a bus with others on their way to St. Francis hospital. The bus ride was long and many of the victims slept, while others of us shared our experiences.

The bus driver drove by St. Francis hospital taking all of those critical patients to Memorial North to drop seven of us off, then drive back to St. Francis, adding one more goof to this exercise.

When we arrived at the ER entrance of Memorial North, there was nobody to greet us. Here is where the wheels came off the wagon. I was supposed to be re-strapped to my backboard and then placed on a gurney to be processed through the ER. There I was, an immobile patient, carrying my own backboard! (Picture below, compliments of a hospital volunteer.) The NOAA Exercise staff greeted us at the door, but gave us no direction. We asked what we should do and they shrugged. We seven went in and stood in the hallway. Nobody came to greet us. There were “real world” ER people waiting and three priests in the ER and we weren’t sure if we should go in or not. We didn’t want to upset people with our bloody injuries and clothes. Finally, we went into the ER waiting room. Nobody reacted. Nobody acted like they knew what we were doing there. It was weird. They began processing us, without even looking at our triage tags! The yellow victims offered to let the red victims go first (because we’re more seriously injured), but we explained that wasn’t our job to fix, it was the hospital staff’s job to notice and fix. After several more minutes, and after more yellow-triage-tagged people were checked in, one of the guys behind the triage desk brought our red triage tags to their attention. They acted like they had never seen them before. I began to wonder if the triage tags were just for the NOAA exercise or if they are used in real-world situations too. Guess what? They are commonly used, yet totally ignored on us. I was still carrying my backboard. When they approached me, I told them I should be on the backboard and a gurney. They got the gurney, had me hop onto the backboard, but never attached me to the backboard at all and never put up any railings on the gurney. I felt like I was going to fall off! Again. I didn’t feel like they were even willing to pretend to be part of the exercise.

They wheeled me down the hall and ordered my treatment. Again, the pen was the fascinating point of discussion. Nobody every looked under my bandage at the mortal wound. The discussion was all about x-rays for my “compound fracture” (and I’m not sure where that came from because I didn’t have one when I entered) and my femoral artery bleed went unnoticed and undetected. So I told them about it and they said I would see an arterial surgeon, but after the x-rays! Wouldn’t I have bled to death by then? For the third time??

The interesting thing I noticed while laying there on the gurney looking at the ceiling tiles, was the conversation going on around me. A woman was clearly annoyed that “somebody” knew about this exercise and didn’t create charts for it. Would somebody have created plentiful charts in advance had this been a real emergency? It was amazing. Only seven patients were routed to this hospital and you would have thought it was 107.

I guess we arrived later than expected and they were done playing “tornado exercise” so they came and got me off the gurney. They were done. We were supposed to be taken to x-ray, the OR, etc. The whole process was to be acted out so that they could see how each group handled the overload to the system and would they have had the appropriate supplies on-hand had it been a real disaster. If seven exercise victims overloaded this hospital, God help us in a real emergency. They knew we were coming and still couldn’t handle it. They just didn’t seem to want to participate or take it seriously.

Memorial North is the closest hospital to us, but we’ll not take our real-life emergencies there. I could see why the emergency medical teams in Hanover were overloaded and overwhelmed and making mistakes processing 138 victims, but that was not true of the heavily-staffed ER receiving only seven patients in a drill they were expecting!

The hospital served us lunch and there was no lime Jell-o. It was actually very good ~ the only redeeming part of this hospital.

The shuttle bus had circled the parking lot of Memorial North hospital for two hour waiting for us. Now that we were there, the driver went MIA and didn’t show up for another hour. We were transported back to Liberty High School in a prisoner van. That was quite an experience!

The whole day was an experience I will never forget! And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

There were 13 agencies involved and it took two years to plan. They learned a lot I’m sure. We learned, God help El Paso County if a real-life disaster strikes.

I know we’re human and we all make mistakes, but it was sobering to think that I probably died three times Saturday (once from waiting 2.5 hours and still not being found or rescued, once from being misdirected at the field triage point, and once from the hospital’s ER lackadaisical approach). Now my wound was life-threatening, but as they explained, some people’s wounds weren’t life-threatening in the beginning, but became life-threatening by the length of time it took and by some of the mistakes that were made.

We watched Channel 11 News and they had my “crying death scene” on the science room floor, me being loaded into the ambulance, and my edited interview.

I’m hoping to get more pictures from the crews, but for now all I have is the one from the hospital volunteer. Oh, and notice the “Exercise in Progress” banners on the bus, so we didn’t freak out the drivers we met on the highway. Those signs were attached in such a way that if there had been a bus accident, we had no way to use the emergency exits.

May I rest in peace.

Michele