DHHS Deploys Mobile Hospital to St. Croix Following Hurricanes

Team members (left to right) Ronnie Murtagh, Brian Barnes, David Ezzell, Roger Kiser and Joe Comello stand in front of the mobile surgical unit with the US Virgin Islands flag in St. Croix.

May 31, 2018 – Within the span of two weeks last year, two Category 5 hurricanes hit the US Virgin Islands, crippling St. Croix’s 190-bed Gov. Juan F. Luis Hospital. The top two floors of the island’s only hospital were torn apart by wind and water and all nine main surgical suites were destroyed.

Enter DHHS’ Office of Emergency Medical Services. By November, OEMS was in contact with their counterparts in the Virgin Islands, beginning the process of deploying the National Mobile Disaster Hospital, an asset controlled by the state. With the only other hospital in the USVI – Schneider Regional Medical Center on St. Thomas – also damaged in the storms, there was a need for additional surgical resources.

Roger Kiser, State Medical Response System Operations Coordinator in OEMS, traveled to the island in April to help set everything up. 

Members of Kiser’s team included Ronnie Murtaugh, mobile disaster hospital logistics coordinator, and Brian Barnes, who works in operations with North Carolina Emergency Management. David Ezzell and Joe Comello, also with OEMS, rounded out the team. NCDHHS and NCEM coordinated with emergency management officials in Hackensack, New Jersey, in addition to the Virgin Islands Territorial Emergency Management Agency. 

One of the main goals of the mobile disaster hospital is to keep healthcare professionals like surgeons, nurses and anesthesiologists in town while the healthcare infrastructure is rebuilt. After Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, Kiser said many healthcare professionals living in disaster areas moved to less ravaged areas, creating a vacuum of doctors and nurses in hard hit areas. The goal is to prevent that from occurring on St. Croix.

Most of the time, the components of the hospital are trucked in, as they were to Marathon, Florida, where some parts of the mobile disaster hospital will remain until the end of July to provide support to the Florida Keys as that area recovers from Hurricane Irma. Assets in Marathon include an emergency department, x-ray machines, patient care areas and a pharmacy.

But since St. Croix is an island, getting the materials there was more complicated. 

“Our biggest challenge was shipping that humongous trailer across the ocean,” Kiser said. 

The mobile surgical unit was trucked to New Jersey to be shipped with another mobile surgical unit from Hackensack. Nor'easters and mechanical issues with the ship plagued the project and delayed the departure. 

The challenges didn’t end once the ship left port. Since the shipment crossed international waters, OEMS was faced with import taxes and customs, something absent from previous deployments since they were within the continental United States. The Territory of USVI helped DHHS resolve these issues.

Once the equipment arrived, Kiser and his team assembled the mobile surgical unit in just seven days. 

“After everything was set up, we handed the keys to hospital administration,” Kiser said. 

The two mobile surgical units sit in a small parking lot to the left of what remains of the main hospital building. It’s attached to what used to be the same-day surgical unit on the ground floor, which now serves as the hospital’s main surgical center. For now, same-day and elective surgery patients are referred to St. Thomas. 

The mobile hospital is just one cog in the wheel of the islands’ recovery. Disaster medical assistance teams deployed as soon as Gov. Juan F. Luis Hospital was damaged, bringing tent-sheltered emergency medical assistance to the disaster zone. 

No patients have walked through the doors of North Carolina’s mobile surgical unit yet due to pending work from USVI contractors and further inspections. Once operational, it will remain on the island for eight to 12 months while a temporary replacement hospital is erected, which will treat patients until the main hospital is rebuilt. The mobile disaster hospital has hard sides, meaning care given inside can be paid for by Medicaid or Medicare. 

This isn’t the first time the mobile disaster hospital has deployed. It was sent to Charlotte for the Democratic National Convention in 2012 in case a large-scale disaster occurred. It also deployed to Louisburg, Miss., in 2014 in the aftermath of a tornado severely damaged the local hospital. OEMS also used the unit in 2016 following Hurricane Matthew to set up a mobile emergency department in Kinston, North Carolina, to support local medical centers.

Just because some of their assets are elsewhere doesn’t mean OEMS is any less ready to respond to a crisis within North Carolina’s borders. At all times, OEMS keeps a 6-bed in-patient unit, pharmacy, X-ray machine and lab ready to deploy anywhere in the state should a disaster occur.

And once the resources in Marathon are retrieved by Kiser and his team, those parts of the mobile disaster hospital will be repaired and reset, waiting for the next deployment.