Across the River from NYC, It Was "John Wayne Time"

When skyscrapers are razed and thousands slaughtered in your backyard, you have more than a front-row seat to history--you're part of it. That's the role the Hoboken (NJ)?Volunteer Ambulance Corps assumed last September 11. Just 1¼ miles from New York City--right across the Hudson River--the HVAC was responding to events before the second tower fell. And really, to this day, it hasn't stopped.

"Ten months after the fact, we're still doing ongoing critiques," HVAC?president Thomas Molta said in July. "We have these informal sessions where we let the guys talk about it and throw things out on the table: 'Maybe we should have done this,' or 'Maybe we should have done that.'"

While the HVAC didn't send members into the city on 9/11, it set up treatment and triage area on the New Jersey side of the Hudson. As the scale of the crisis expanded and additional resources joined in, that grew into a field hospital at which more than 2,100 victims were eventually treated. In addition, more than 10,000 people were decontaminated.

"People started coming over not by train, but on ferry boats, tugboats and private watercraft," says Molta. "They were all covered with this grey dust, and nobody knew what it was--we didn't know if it was just simple asbestos from the building, or if there was anything in the planes, or if anything had been planted in the buildings before they came down. So we figured these people needed to be decontaminated. We coordinated through the Hoboken Fire Department, and they set up an emergency decon area and reached out for some hazmat teams. And the hazmat teams that came in set up a regular decon corridor. It took about 40 minutes to get them in place, but rough estimates are that between 10,000 and 11,000 people were decontaminated in Hoboken."

All of the HVAC's members responded that day, though they were deployed in shifts, with some waiting back at headquarters to relieve their colleagues. The HVAC also kept its regular ambulance service to the city operating, as no mutual aid was available.

"Our regular local mutual aid providers were all waterfront communities facing the same thing," says Molta. "It was John Wayne time--we were on our own."

Lessons Learned

While the Hoboken Volunteer Ambulance Corps performed efficiently and successfully on 9/11, they, like everyone, learned some lessons and found ways to improve.

In the months since, its providers have received training in terrorism/WMD, and HVAC ambulances have been equipped with Geiger counters. Preplanning for future large-scale events has been done. The anthrax scares of late '01 (HVAC?answered an estimated 165 suspected-anthrax calls) led to full-facial respirators and Tyvex suits.

Specific problems of 9/11 have been addressed as well: Incident command has been instituted to better organize large responses and track member activities. Radios have been added and programmed with frequencies used by neighboring ambulance services, ensuring working communications. And triage/treatment operations have been made more mobile, so if relocation is needed, it can be safely and easily done.

"Though it was tragic, it had huge learning possibilities. We found a lot of our own faults," says Molta. "If anything positive came out of it, it's that we'll be ready if something like that happens in the future."