Quick Exit: Colo. Wildfire Forces Desperate Hospital Evacuation

EMS crews in Colorado are being credited for the flawless and safe evacuation of 51 patients from Centura Health’s Avista Adventist Hospital in Louisville to their homes and other Centura hospitals as the Marshall wildfire threatened the facility Dec. 30.

On a New Year’s holiday weekend, with an impending severe weather event that would dump eight inches of snow and in the midst of an uptick in the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare workers in the Boulder area faced yet another major challenge: the flames of a widespread wildfire.

The Marshall fire ultimately destroyed nearly 1,000 homes and other structures and encompassed around 6,000 acres between Denver and Boulder. Authorities believe the fire originated from a group of buildings owned by a religious sect.

At least seven people were injured. One of three people missing in the aftermath has been found alive. Another challenge for first responders came when a man was arrested for allegedly threatening a firefighter with a firearm; investigators later found 2,000 rounds of ammunition in his possession.

Avista Adventist Hospital stood in the path of the fire.

“We initially received from our center’s incident command news that we would be on pre-evacuation status,” notes Angie Simonson, who directs the transfer center team for the Centura Health system. “That was really the moment where that team and our emergency preparedness team started navigating what would be next step.”

Simonson’s team’s responsibilities include helping patients get care in the system, outside the system, or between Centura facilities.

Issues that needed to be immediately addressed included where there would be room to send patients and if there would be nurse and care teams to accompany them.

Teams also considered whether they would need support from the state’s Combined Hospital Transfer Center (CHTC) to help manage all the movement.

“My team’s role was to make sure we were prepared, knowing where the plan was for our patients to go and what kind of support we would need, to give understanding that it would look a bit different than our daily operations,” says Simonson. “We wouldn’t be able to do all the doc-to-docs. We would have to move these patients in a swift fashion. As things quickly unraveled, we found out we were on evacuation.”

A systemwide decision was made to transfer patients to two other facilities, accompanied by care teams.

“We were able to fluidly move these patients in quick fashion where the receiving facilities were ready and able to accept them,” Simonson says. “The transfer center’s responsibility was to help with navigating some of the logistics behind the scenes.”

‘A Really Fluid Process’

The evacuations began with NICU, ICU, and ED patients, then moved to med-surg patients and staff. Centura’s Longmont United Hospital received five patients, St. Anthony North received 25, and 21 were discharged.

“What I heard is that when one ambulance left, another one was right there,” says Simonson. “They did a really great job in communication and making sure they were present and ready to transfer those patients. It did not take a call from the team or us reaching out to find out why there was a delay—it was a really fluid process.”

Communication among CHTC members—the large healthcare systems throughout the state—was crucial, notes Simonson, helping Centura leaders know where they had availability and what they might do if the crisis worsened.

“We also were lucky enough to have some of our rural partners reach out to see how they could help,” she adds. “Did we need to send patients who were receiving care for COVID in their direction so we could open up space in the Denver area to care for these patients being evacuated? We created these wonderful avenues for communication, which definitely were utilized in this unforeseen circumstance.

“In a pandemic time over a holiday weekend where we were getting severe weather the next day, things couldn’t have gone any better. In an emergency meeting that evening, we in the CHTC talked about the unknowns—the challenges of the weather coming, the unknowns of patients coming into these facilities that might be on pre-evacuation, what we’d do if they had to evacuate. The communication was super helpful, and that continued throughout the weekend to make sure all the patients in the community were taken care of.”

Avista Adventist Hospital will be closed for the foreseeable future due to extensive smoke damage necessitating professional cleaning and sanitizing.

Help Local EMS

Meanwhile, a special program and fund has been created to assist EMS professionals affected by the fire. The EMS Professionals’ Emergency Relief Fund, administered by the Emergency Medical Services Association of Colorado, provides assistance to emergency medical and trauma services professionals and their families affected by disaster. Money is currently being raised for those affected by the Boulder County wildfires.

Simonson says her advice to others who face a similar situation is to “communicate and lean in. I believe that’s why it went so flawlessly across our state. Everyone leaned in—every EMS team and all the police and fire, at a moment’s notice. That goes to show how much we as a state have grown over the pandemic in really improving our communication and the systems we have in place to handle something like this.”

Carol Brzozowski is a freelance journalist and former daily newspaper reporter in South Florida. Her work has been published in more than 200 media outlets.