UVRMC practices evacuation for power failures, flood

PROVO — A power outage and flooded generators at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center would force the urgent evacuation of 400 patients, but on Thursday those disasters forced out only 65 "patients," who wound up deflated in the lobby.

UVRMC held an in-house evacuation drill, which left the mannequin patients in various stages of undress — adult diapers, open-backed gowns, scrub pants — in order to be prepared for a possible catastrophe.

Recent wildfires in California forced four San Diego hospitals to evacuate. And Hurricane Katrina forced similar situations in New Orleans, which reinforced the need for hospitals to prepare for disasters in which they would have to evacuate, said Janet Frank, spokeswoman for UVRMC.

"All hospitals learned a lot of things from Katrina," she said.

Critical units of the hospital — the Newborn Intensive Care Unit and the adult Intensive Care Unit — were evacuated first, directed by a command center made up of administrators and emergency planning personnel. All the evacuees met in the lobby and the people in the command center called other Utah County hospitals to see how many patients could be taken.

No other hospitals or ambulances were directly involved with this evacuation, unlike other drills throughout the year, Frank said. Countywide drills are held about twice a year and involve ambulances, police and several hospitals. The hospital also holds drills for disasters that involve a mass influx of patients, she said.

Steve Smoot, UVRMC administrator, said the other hospitals in the area could take all but 50 patients. In an actual emergency, those other patients would be sent to Salt Lake County hospitals, he said. The sicker patients would be taken by helicopter to the appropriate hospital. Some of the babies in the NICU would be taken to Primary Children's Medical Center.

UVRMC has sent about 200 employees to a Federal Emergency Management Agency training hospital in Alabama for weeklong emergency training sessions, Smoot said.

State licensing stipulations require the hospital to have at least two drills every year. UVRMCl has four or five in addition to the two state-required drills to prepare for different types of disasters, said Robin Ebmeyer, emergency management coordinator for the Utah County Intermountain Healthcare hospitals.

Ebmeyer said communication during the drill was a problem and emergency preparedness personnel discovered what worked and what needed to be fixed through the drill. She said there weren't any big problems.

"The thing that's nice is it prompts good discussion," she said. "The staff want to do the right thing and care for the patient."

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