MASH made for peacetime

Teams of mobile medical personnel, fielded by FEMA, help the injured in areas hit by disaster

BY RIDGELY OCHS | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

September 12, 2005

GULFPORT, Miss. - Sherry Anderson was standing outside the cluster of brown medical tents, smiling. She had just received a tetanus shot and a tube of ointment from the medics to treat a fungal infection she got helping to clean out her friend's house after it was flooded by Hurricane Katrina. Her own home, a block from the beach, had been destroyed, she said.

"It's an unbelievable setup. It reminds me of 'M*A*S*H,'" she said, referring to the movie and TV show.

It's actually a Disaster Medical Assistance Team, or DMAT. Under the direction of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 70 teams nationwide - including several from New York - are composed of volunteers who train to be ready within hours to go to disaster sites and take over where local medics cannot.

This particular team - a 35-member crew of doctors, nurses, physician's assistants, paramedics, emergency medical technicians and pharmacists from Michigan - arrived Aug. 31, two days after the storm, and set up its tents outside Garden Park Medical Center, a 130-bed community hospital that had been flooded. The partly functional hospital had evacuated as many of its 60 remaining patients as possible. But its staff - many now homeless - were still overwhelmed, hospital spokesman Tom Carlton said.

Enter the disaster team, which acts "as an urgent-care facility," said its commander, Tony Averbuch of Franklin, Mich. It treats those it can and sends more seriously ill patients to the hospital. With members of teams from Kentucky and Florida, it also has been sending strike teams out to assist those who can't travel.

With three shifts running 24/7, business has been brisk, said Michael Nutt, a surgical physician's assistant from Warren, Mich. "We've had people who needed follow-up from surgery they had the week before [the hurricane]. We had a guy hit in the chest by a refrigerator. We had a guy who cut his face with a chain saw. "

They also see people with gastrointestinal problems from contaminated water, wounds that are infected and chronic illnesses such as diabetes or high blood pressure, Averbuch said. He said he didn't expect the number of patients to drop off soon.

"The scope of this disaster - we've never seen something this large," said Averbuch, a fire chief. "We are trained for the worst-case scenario, but until you see it, you can't really understand it."

David Diamond, commander of a New York-based team, echoed Averbuch. Diamond, who lives in Roslyn and is a real estate developer, has been based since Tuesday with his team outside West Jefferson Memorial Hospital in Marrero, La., one of only three hospitals out of 15 in the area able to partially function. He among about 10 Long Islanders on the 35-person team.

"This was more devastation than the World Trade Center - without minimizing the World Trade Center," Diamond said in a phone interview. "We've basically lost part of our country."

His group is part of an elite unit of 12 teams trained to deploy within six hours of a call and to sustain themselves for 72 hours without outside help. The team has been augmented with a pediatric strike force and mental-health professionals, he said.

Still, its members have been taxed emotionally and physically, said Chris Airey, a paramedic from Mineola who has been working the 7 p.m.-7 a.m. shift.

"We're seeing people ... an hour and a half after [their] rescue. We've seen quite a lot of people who have lost everything," Airey said. "It's real bad here, that's for sure."