EARTHQUAKE: THE LONG ROAD BACK : Emergencies Routine for Volunteer Medical Team

A 39-member emergency medical team from New Mexico had barely set up shop--four tents outside a quake-damaged medical building in Canoga Park--when the patients started showing up at noon Saturday.

Within a hour, the waiting room was full: with pregnant women, sick babies, stressed-out grandparents and a National Guardsman with an asthma attack so acute he had to be taken away in an ambulance.

Most of it was fairly routine medical stuff for the team of five doctors, 12 nurses, 12 paramedics and other emergency medical specialists, hardened veterans of disaster scenes from the Virgin Islands to Hawaii.

“We can handle anything from headaches to heart attacks,” said John Gaffney, an administrator at the University of New Mexico and one of the team’s leaders. “We expect just about anything. That is what disaster medicine is all about.”

No one gets a bill.

The crew, organized by the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and dispatched by federal health authorities, is part of the national disaster medical system. Their disaster work began in 1989, when they were dispatched to the Virgin Islands in the wake of Hurricane Hugo, and included visits in 1992 to Miami to assist victims of Hurricane Andrew, and Hawaii after Hurricane Iniki.

The MASH-like unit of civilian volunteers arrived at March Air Force Base on Friday night. They were bused to the site in Canoga Park, at Gault Street and Remmet Avenue, and set up the tents.

The team carries its own water purifier, which can operate on solar power if utilities are out, and stockpiles of food and other supplies. One team member is a licensed pharmacist and travels with a portable pharmacy.

“Our mission is to be able to go anywhere and set up without having to increase the drain on the local resources any more than we have to. Every member of the team is prepared to live in whatever austere environment they send us to,” Gaffney said.

Each member of the team had a bedroll in case they have to sleep in one of the tents, which had been set up in a parking lot next to the county’s Canoga Park Health Center.

Most of the first patients they saw Saturday had been living in parks or shelters since Monday and were receiving their first medical attention since the earthquake.

County health officials had spread word that the clinic was open by passing out flyers, in English and Spanish, in parks and shelters.

One young family arrived with four of the five people badly in need of medical attention. The mother, whose name was not released, was pregnant and feeling contractions every 20 minutes. Her husband appeared to have broken his hand. He told the medics he had fallen Monday morning when he and his family were scrambling for safety. His hand was badly swollen and his fingers were bent at odd angles. Two of their toddlers were running high temperatures, had sore throats and stuffy noses. They had been living in a nearby park since the earthquake.

Another early patient, Rosa Lopez, a grandmother, was frightened badly during the earthquake, and had to be driven to the field clinic by a friend. Her face drawn by tension, her eyes still darting about nervously as if she expected another earthquake, Lopez said she hoped to get something for “high blood pressure.”

A little while later, a woman showed up with a baby with a bad case of chickenpox. After a quick examination, the nurses determined that the chickenpox was in its late stages and not much of a threat to be contagious.

Still, the spread of chickenpox is one of the biggest fears of county health authorities. Although most adults and children have had it, it is especially dangerous to pregnant women because it can travel through the mother to the fetus, or be especially virulent if it attacks a newborn infant. The nurses kept the baby with chickenpox away from the three pregnant women who had shown up during the first hour.

And so it went: a host of ailments, but nothing extraordinary.

Jeff McBrayer, a paramedic from Albuquerque, said: “Usually after the first few days the major casualties have been dealt with, and then it’s all the routine stuff. People have lost their medications, they can’t get access to things. Sick kids, especially. That’s what we see the most.”

Local officials said the New Mexico team meets a big need. With hospitals stretched to the maximum, particularly those in the west San Fernando Valley, emergency workers hoped that patients with less than acute medical needs would visit the clinic first.

“It’s great,” Los Angeles City Fire Capt. Lawrence Mayer said after a tour. “People who leave here and (are sent) to a hospital would have gone anyway. If they come here first and get treated, (many) won’t need to go to the hospital.”

County health authorities appeared to be breathing a sigh of relief over reports that--so far, at least--there had not been any outbreaks of contagious disease among the thousands of homeless earthquake victims who have moved into tents and emergency shelters.

With the county in the throes of a tuberculosis epidemic and the worst flu outbreak in years, concerns had been raised about the spread of disease. Chickenpox is especially worrisome for county health officials because cold, damp winters are when it is at its worst.

“We know that it’s inevitable that if children go into these crowded situations this time of year, some of them are going to have chickenpox,” said Dr. Shirley Fannin, a county disease control administrator.

Fannin said that she did not consider the spread of tuberculosis a serious threat because most TB cases are concentrated in the central part of Los Angeles County and most of the quake victims are in the northwest Valley. Still, county health workers were trying to keep track of each tuberculosis case.

Health workers said two families with small babies suffering from chickenpox had been turned away from a large tent city for quake victims set up at Canoga Park High School. Both families then found friends to stay with, according to Red Cross workers.