That's how long it took to move 112 patients from Southwest Florida Regional Medical Center to Gulf Coast Medical Center on Sunday. That's four hours and almost 200 patients fewer than organizers initially estimated.
The emergency room at Southwest Florida Regional closed at 7 a.m.; by 3:30 p.m. the typically bustling, 34-year-old hospital was empty except for the staffers who stayed behind to complete the closure. As Southwest closed, the new $285 million, 436,000-square-foot expansion at Gulf Coast went fully online.
It was a plan years in the making, initially laid out by Hospital Corp. of America, the former owner of the two hospitals. Lee Memorial Health System inherited the construction project and building closure plans when it bought the hospitals in 2006.Kamas -- It only looked like a run on the bank.
Ford trucks, SUVs and mini-vans -- a car every 10 seconds -- and pedestrians crashed the Zions drive-through windows Saturday on this homey mountain town's Main Street.
But even though cops and paramedics cased the scene, there was no crime and no threat to the cash. Instead, for two hours, hundreds poured into Zions Bank in Kamas and Coalville to practice how to cope with bioterrorism or another public-health emergency. For practice, volunteers relayed the information back to the county's emergency operations center.
The blood and gore were all part of an act, right down to the tree limb that impaled an Effingham County High School student.
But it was getting treated as if it were very much real.
On a life-sized wraparound screen in a nondescript Brooklyn warehouse Thursday, a virtual explosion ripped through a building and engulfed firefighters gathered outside.
A city worker playing an FDNY chief grabbed a joystick, zoomed back for a better look, and shouted for more pumped water, more engines and help for an injured pedestrian.
Across the room, Office of Emergency Management training expert Natan Mandelbaum punched those commands into one of his two laptops, then added some twists of his own.
Digital communications are no longer a luxury. In this new century, both lives and livelihoods depend on being able to get information in all its forms across town, across the country and around the world.
And that’s why, four times a year, AT&T prepares for what its staff calls “the smoking hole” — a disaster that takes out a big-city central office, leaving a gaping void in the company’s massive telecommunications backbone.
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The quiet of the Primary and Infant School in Trelawny was on Wednesday (Jan.14) broken by the blast of sirens from emergency vehicles attached to the Trelawny Fire Station, the Falmouth Hospital, and the Police Department.
As the vehicles descended on the school compound, the startled children were quickly but orderly ushered from their classrooms into the school yard. They were to participate in an earthquake evacuation drill, which would test the school's and the parish's readiness for such an occurrence.
WASHINGTON – Senior officials in the Bush administration and members of President-elect Barack Obama's staff teamed up at the White House Tuesday for a rehearsal of how to handle a hypothetical terrorist attack on an American city.
During the drill, they responded to a scenario in which transportation facilities and other targets were hit with improvised explosive devices. The exercise was part of an effort to smooth the transition from the Bush to Obama administrations without jeopardizing the nation's preparedness in case of a terrorist attack, pandemic or natural disaster. The White House said it was a realistic and conceivable scenario, but was not based on any current, credible threat.
WASHINGTON (AFP) — The outgoing White House administration will next week hold a joint "disaster scenario" exercise with top members of the incoming team of president-elect Barack Obama, US officials said Friday.
"I'm not going to go into the details of it, but it is a disaster scenario where the government would be very much tested," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.
"It is an exercise scenario, a hypothetical scenario that is designed to test and tax the capabilities of the federal government," he added.
He did not specify whether Obama or vice president-elect Joe Biden would take part in Tuesday's three-hour long exercise, saying merely it was part of regular training events and had not been motivated by any specific threat.
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