Barnstable County ReportVol. XIX, No. 4, Fall 2011
Barnstable County Report By George Heufelder, MS, RS, Director,
Barnstable County Department of Health & Environment
Irene came calling, and the county was ready.
While many of us were hunkering down awaiting the landfall of Hurricane Irene, a dedicated partnership of public sector and private volunteer personnel were preparing for the worst.
Hurricane preparedness efforts in Barnstable County are facilitated by the Barnstable County Regional Emergency Preparedness Committee (BCREPC). Formed in 2002 by the County Commissioners and initially tasked with helping towns locate, secure and make communities aware of hazardous materials used in their jurisdictions under the Community Right-to-Know Act, the BCREPC has evolved into a collaborative of organizations and departments that prepare for all man-made and natural hazards.
In the days before Irene even made landfall in the United States, conference calls with weather forecasters, disaster response teams, fire and police services, volunteer coordinators and others took place to execute preliminary readiness plans such as checking availability of volunteers, verifying emergency supply agreements, and providing initial notices to managers of facilities and assets that might be used.
In the more immediate prelude to Irene, teams of volunteers were preparing to support six regional emergency shelters.
Learning from other national disasters, the teams of volunteers were positioned before the storm and supplies for the shelters were pre-positioned.
The American Red Cross, the Cape Cod Medical Reserve Corps, local Citizen Emergency Response Teams and other volunteer units all played a vital role in staffing these regional shelters. For those residents who did not want to abandon the family pet, two of the shelters were supported by the Cape’s Disaster Animal Response Team in coordination with animal control officers of Harwich, Brewster, and Chatham. Their efforts sponsored cages, food and some isolation during their stay.
It earlier had been determined that this regional sheltering strategy was the most efficient way to use limited resources. Included were requirements of the ability to accommodate individuals who needed additional assistance due to other life challenges. Other partners in this effort include public works departments, the Cape Cod Regional Transit Authority, and utility companies including NStar, National Grid, Verizon and Comcast.
All of these and storm response efforts were coordinated by a unique feature of the response team called the Multi-Agency Coordination Center or MACC. During the storm MACC maintained communication with all of the shelters and other response agencies across town jurisdictions, including the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.
The communication system was hosted in a location near the Barnstable County Sheriff’s Office, but was backed up by the Cape Cod Amateur Radio Emergency Services teams.
Nothing can substitute for personal emergency plans we should all have to make it through the first 48 hours of these natural disasters. But sometimes our personal preparedness plans get overwhelmed, especially when homes are destroyed or threatened. That’s when community resources must be available.
So, the next time you hear those winds howl or that winter ice storm sets in, take some comfort in the fact that there is a response team that has anticipated the event and is most likely pre-positioned to help.
September was Emergency Preparedness Month. Even if you missed that, it is not too late to get your house in order. Everyone should have a personal emergency plan. Simply follow the mantra “Get a kit, Make a plan, Be informed.”
Want to learn more, or get involved in community assistance yourself? Check out www.BCREPC.org today.
A group of old hurricane hands gathered at Cape Cod Community College the other morning for the quarterly meeting of the Advisory Board of To Your Good Health, A Health Care Newsletter.
The topic for discussion concerned healthcare ramifications of our recent visit from Ms. Irene.
The answer? Not much.
In part, the lady in question was no damp, to twist a phrase.
In larger measure, because the Cape and its caregivers were totally prepared.
And the consensus, this is no cause for complacency next time the storm warnings start to appear on our screens.
Frank Ricci is Supervisor of Security and Emergency Preparation for Cape Cod Healthcare.
The big fear concerning Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis is that it is situated only 10 feet above sea level.
“We had our sand bags and plenty of water and supplies stocked up,” Mr. Ricci reported and generators primed to take over when power went out for about eight hours.
The only problem? “For some reason, we had lights in the hallways of the psych center, but not in the bathrooms,” he related, adding that this would be dealt with by reconfiguring the grid.
One little known problem relating to weather disasters involves hospital staff whose own families may be in danger. “You’ve got to take care of staff first because they can’t take care of the patients if they’re not taken care of first,” noted Carol Vigliano, a care management adviser.
“We had two floors set aside for them,” Mr. Ricci responded.
And then, as Dr. Herbert Mathewson, retired Medical Director of Cape Cod Hospital, recalled, there was an earlier hurricane when the doyenne of a well-known Cape family showed up at the hospital when her seaside home was threatened. “We put her up in one of the suites for three days and never ‘admitted’ her. She had a great time talking with the nurses,” he related.
Incidentally, one reason the Cape has been so well-prepared is that Jim Lyons, retired founding CEO of Cape Cod Healthcare, was CEO at St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River for the Blizzard of ’78, when nurses were brought to the hospital by Army half-tracks. “So when I came to the Cape I knew you had to have that checklist on how to get staff from their homes to the hospital,” he said.
Steve Abbott, who succeeded Mr. Lyons as CEO, said he learned some lessons from a hospital team that helped out down south in Katrina. “The hospital became an emergency center for employees, their families and even their pets.”
“The message is that in any big storm, the power is going to go off,” said Dr. Arthur Bickford, a co-founder of the Duffy Clinic. “That may even affect cell phones, so the cell phone transmitters must have their own generators.”
The long loss of power in some Cape areas already has attracted the attention of Beacon Hill. Seth Rolbein, top aide to Senator Dan Wolf, said his boss already was calling for hearings to “try to understand what happened and why.” He added that “a big part of the conversation is do we bury our power lines, but we still want to keep rates low and so are we willing to make that investment?”
Loss of power can be critical for some home-bound patients such as those on respirators, Mary Devlin, the VNA’s public health and wellness manager, pointed out. “All the patients we see have emergency plans themselves,” she said, “but we also have priority one patients and priority two patients who really would have a problem and so require extra attention.”
Unable to attend, Gary Sheehan, President of Cape Medical Supply, provided an e-mail report with an interesting twist noting that Irene did indeed provide challenges to home oxygen providers up and down the East Coast, not just the Cape.
“As the days wore on it became more and more difficult to provide back-up supplies to patients in their home so they could continue to breathe,” he wrote. “Ultimately our own emergency preparedness plans proved effective and we were able to provide services across the region so patients could remain independent and at home—save for a small window at the height of the storm when excessive wind speed made driving trucks on the road unsafe…and the week following Irene when many hundreds of patients were still without power.”
These home services, he added, “provided tens of millions of dollars in uncompensated care and created a net savings in cost avoidance to insurance companies in the hundreds of millions of dollars since every patient cared for and serviced at home was a patient who did not end up in a hospital.”
Cape Cod Community College has brick buildings and they’re safely on a hill, but Sue Madigan, Dean of Health Sciences, Social Sciences and Human Services, said, “We still have an emergency plan, we put everything away and educate our people to take things seriously.”
But Dr. Mathewson, now medical director of the VNA, came up with the conversation stopper: “We get the warning signals, but a new point of vulnerability could be windmills. What happens in the future if they are providing much of our electricity? How will they do in a hurricane?”
Wondering if the law of unintended consequences could strike again, the meeting adjourned.