Doctor Sees Critical Shortage of Hospital Beds, Resources : Dire Warning Sounded on the Big Quake

For Dr. Donald Cheu, the possibility of a catastrophic earthquake conjures up images of hospital workers fending off hungry people while the severely injured are left to die because doctors have no time to treat them.

“Timewise, we don’t want to spend eight or 10 hours (performing surgery) on a single patient when we can use the same time on 200 patients needing more minor, life-saving operations,” Cheu told a group of disaster planners recently.

Cheu is the medical committee chairman of the Governor’s Earthquake Task Force, which is planning emergency measures for a devastating temblor measuring 8.3 on the Richter scale. Geologists expect such a quake will hit Southern California within 30 to 50 years.

38,000 Hospital Beds Intact

Cheu said the big quake will leave about 38,000 hospital beds intact out of about 48,000 in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.

But he said operating room space and doctors’ time would be limited, and they would have to focus their efforts on saving the lives of the greatest number of people.

“Some people are going to be left to die, unfortunately, and that decision is going to be hard to make,” Cheu said.

With possible food shortages due to blocked freeways and railroads, some hungry people will go to hospitals feigning injury so they can be fed, the South San Francisco surgeon said, adding: “How are we going to fend off those people?”

Cheu, who works at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, spoke to more than 100 representatives of emergency, police and fire agencies and private industry at the annual conference of the Southern California Emergency Services Assn.

The two-day meeting focused on how officials will cope with a great earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault. California’s emergency response plan says that if such a quake struck at 4:30 p.m. on a weekday, up to 30,000 people would die and as many as 100,000 would be seriously injured.

Cheu said he thinks the most likely toll will be 12,500 to 15,000 deaths, 50,000 serious injuries and up to 1.5 million minor injuries.

“If you think an 8.3 earthquake is just business as usual, but more of it, you’re going to be in sad shape,” he said. “. . . The hospitals undoubtably will be overrun.”

Cheu said most hospitals “are fairly well prepared” for major disaster. But he warned they will have to depend on their own medical supplies for at least a few days, perhaps go without electricity and limit water consumption by using disposable utensils and lining toilets with trash bags.

Provisions for Storing Dead

“You don’t need water and power to put on splints,” he said.

Better provisions must be made for storing the dead until they can be identified because “we really don’t have a good system now,” Cheu said.

Despite the magnitude of a great quake disaster, Cheu told his audience he didn’t want “to scare the hell out of you” because “I don’t want this (quake) to be thought of like nuclear warfare, where we all throw up our hands and say there’s nothing we can do.”