Preaching Preparedness Oklahoma City Man Urges Hospitals To Create Disaster Plans

There were too many volunteers and not enough body bags the day the bomb blew up in Oklahoma City.

Those were only two of the problems facing medical workers in the hours after a powerful fertilizer bomb reduced the downtown federal building to rubble, said David Dagg, security and safety director for the city’s St. Anthony’s Medical Center.

Dagg spoke Thursday to a room jammed with Inland Northwest medical workers and hospital administrators at the Governor’s Industrial Safety & Health Conference at the Spokane Convention Center.

More than 1,800 people attended the conference, sponsored by the Washington state Department of Labor and Industries. The event will continue today.

In a two-hour presentation Thursday, Dagg recounted the lessons his hospital learned after the bombing, which killed 168 people and wounded more than 500.

Just after the 9 a.m. explosion, the first of the more than 200 patients St. Anthony’s treated that day began streaming in, Dagg said.

“By 9:40, we were inundated with patients. We also were inundated with volunteers,” he said.

There were more people willing to help out than jobs to do, Dagg said. Hospital personnel herded the volunteers into a gymnasium and tried to keep them under control.

But people kept sneaking out and trying to help out doctors and nurses who were following a strict disaster plan, Dagg said.

“Several people we had to kick out of ER and send them back to wait for an assignment,” he said. “Very few of those people were ever used, which was frustrating for them. People who volunteer want to get out there and help.”

Inland Northwest hospital administrators should come up with a plan for volunteers before disaster strikes to avoid similar situations, Dagg said.

The media were another distraction. Reporters clogged access to the hospital’s emergency room, disturbing medical workers trying to treat the injured, he said.

“The national media were the biggest problem by far,” Dagg said. “They kept getting in the way and getting in the way.”

Some out-of-town TV reporters bought laboratory coats to try to pass themselves off as hospital workers to gain access to victims, he said.

Dagg encouraged hospital administrators to do what they can to accommodate reporters but also “keep them out of your hair.”

Communications were a shambles. Neither regular nor cellular telephones worked in the hours after the bombing. All lines were jammed with calls, Dagg said.

So, runners had to carry messages between hospitals, authorities and the city’s blood bank.

St. Anthony’s also lacked sufficient security guards to maintain order at the hospital.

The hospital’s reserve security force was made up of off-duty police officers. The problem was no police officers were off-duty after the bomb exploded, Dagg said.

But not all was chaos.

Doctors, nurses and emergency medical personnel working under the city’s coordinated disaster plan set up a sophisticated triage system to determine which of the wounded needed help first.

There were plenty of doctors and nurses available to care for the victims, Dagg said.

He encouraged all hospitals to create reasonable disaster plans and stick to them.

“We haven’t made a whole lot of changes to our plan since then,” Dagg said. “It worked OK.”

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