Disaster response glitches reviewed in Maine

Communications called ‘suboptimal’

By Meg Haskell
Bangor Daily News (Maine)
Copyright 2007 Bangor Daily News

BREWER, Maine — At a recent disaster drill involving seven hospitals and several emergency management agencies in northern and eastern Maine, communications broke down in a big way - and not as part of the carefully orchestrated earthquake scenario.

First, the plan to contact 150 participants’ pagers with a single call failed due to a technology problem. Plan B involved having someone dial each individual number by hand, resulting in “suboptimal” communication with the players.

And an ambitious conference call - aimed at getting all the participants briefed and up to speed at the same time - ultimately flopped when AT&T lost the connection.

According to Kathy Knight of the Northeastern Maine Regional Resource Center, who helped coordinate the drill on Dec. 12, the failure highlights the importance of being able to communicate efficiently - or at all - with other responders in the event of a large-scale emergency.

“The good thing was realizing how really important that [conference call] was going to be,” Knight said at a regional disaster planning meeting on Thursday. “Regardless of the failures, we learned it’s an essential part of the plan.”

Knight, who directs the federally funded resource center, is charged with coordinating “all-disaster” planning in the entire northern half of Maine, including the specialized work of planning for a long-predicted influenza pandemic.

Her office is located at the Brewer headquarters of Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems. Centers affiliated with health systems in southern and central Maine are engaged in similar work.

Knight has convened a planning collaborative composed of representatives from 21 hospitals in the northern half of Maine as well as members of emergency management agencies, community health centers, the American Red Cross, public health and public safety offices, and other likely first responders to any major disaster.

Every three or four weeks for almost a year, they’ve met in a windowless basement conference room at the Cianchette Building in Brewer.

“The concept is that we’re all stronger working together,” Knight explained Thursday, during a break in the latest meeting.

Members of the collaborative, she said, are developing professional relationships and learning how they can help each other in the event of a flu pandemic, a severe earthquake, a terrorist attack or other large-scale disaster.

“A disaster is not the time to exchange business cards,” she said, taking a line from U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ presentation about the botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Thursday’s meeting served as an opportunity to review the work of the past year and strategize for the future. Several in the group said they’ve had trouble getting their employers to invest in the training and equipment needed to build a strong disaster response.

One participant said only three people at the midsize hospital where she works know how to set up a complicated decontamination tent purchased last year with federal funds.

And training she received almost a year ago on the correct way to suit up in a protective biohazard suit is not enough to make her feel confident that she could safely tell a co-worker how to do it . Yet the hospital’s administrators are reluctant to free up staff for additional training.

“For those of us whose job it is to get our institutions ready and our staffs trained, it is very frustrating,” she said.

Rick Danforth of the state’s public health laboratory in Augusta said clinical labs at hospitals and health centers around the state have been slow in responding to the threat of a flu pandemic or other biological disaster.

They should be laying in extra supplies, expanding the range of tests they can perform and making contingency plans in case their labs get contaminated or are otherwise unusable, he said.

“It’s hard to get people’s attention on this,” Danforth said.

But improving communication remains key. Collaborative member Peter Brown, a specialist in satellite communications, said that a number of technologies already are part of the planning process.

All Maine hospitals are currently equipped with telephones that rely on satellite signals in the event that conventional phone lines are lost, he said. In addition, short-wave radio and wireless technologies are available and may offer solutions.

No communications plan is foolproof, he said, but human behaviors remain as much or more of the problem as the limitations of technology.

In addition to ironing out these problems, the group identified a number of other goals for the coming year.

These include expanding the collaborative to include private medical practices and home-care agencies; customizing the disaster plan for special groups such as migrant workers, children and people in long-term care facilities; proposing alternative standards of medical care in the event of a major crisis; and continuing to encourage all Mainers - including private businesses, municipalities and individuals - to prepare for a flu pandemic.