National Nurses United

FALLINGDOWN ON THE JOB For more than a decade, California hospitals have procrastinated meeting deadlines to make critical seismic upgrades. Will nurses and their patients be safe when the next Big One strikes? BY LUCIA HWANG G iven what happened the last time around during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Tim Thomas knows from real experience just how critical it is to work in a safe, functioning hospital when the next Big One hits California. Thomas is an operating room RN and chief nurse representative at Watsonville Community Hospital, located less than 10 miles away from Loma Prieta's epicenter in the Santa Cruz mountains. At 5:04 p.m. on Oct. 17, Thomas had just helped wrap up two cases and was sitting talking to a coworker in a nearby office when they were both knocked out of their chairs by the jolt of the quake. Everything went black, all the books fell off the shelves, and he found himself rolling around on the floor. "It was very scary," remembered Thomas, who has worked at Watsonville community Hospital for 22 years. "It seemed like the building was falling down." Pipes and ductwork were spilling out of the ceilings, and doors were even momentarily jammed shut as the entire building twisted from the immense pressure. After the shaking stopped, Thomas said he jumped up and checked on his patients in recovery. The OR was fortunately located 10 REGISTERED NURSE on the first floor, so he and a PACU nurse grabbed the nearest gurneys and whisked their patients out to the parking lot. Once outside, he realized that the power was out in the whole building and worried about the fourth floor critical care RNs who might be dealing with patients on ventilators. "As much as I didn't want to go back in, I ran up the stairs to CCU to check on them," he said. By another stroke of luck, nobody up there was on vent. Within the hour, said Thomas, dozens of injured people started arriving at the hospital. The entire medical staff scrambled to treat concussions, bad lacerations, broken bones, and even performed surgery in the parking lot under huge flood lights the firefighters erected since there was no power in the hospital. Due to landslides, all the roads and bridges into and out of Watsonville were impassable, so the hospital had to evacuate 14 of the most critical patients by helicopter out to other facilities. "It looked like a war zone," said Thomas. The conditions at Watsonville Community Hospital were not optimal, but would have been even worse if the structure had not weathered the quake. In 2000, the hospital moved to a new building built under modern seismic codes, and Thomas feels a little better knowing W W W. C A L N U R S E S . O R G DECEMBER 2007

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