“Earthquake. Earthquake. Expect shaking. Drop, cover and hold on. Expect shaking now. Take protective action.”
That message will be heard seconds before an earthquake hits at Dignity Health Northridge Hospital Medical Center.
The ShakeAlert Early Warning System, developed by U.S. Geological Survey and Cal Tech, was launched Thursday, and once it’s fully operational and training on it is complete, it will use a system of hand-held radios, GPS and an overhead paging system to deliver notification of an earthquake. Anyone in the hospital at the time of a shake will know when it strikes several seconds to a minute before depending on the distance from the epicenter. Ultimately, it will have the capability to bring elevators to the nearest floor, open doors, pre-start generators and notify surgical teams of the possible looming disaster.
Dignity’s announcement of the early warning system comes 25 years after the Northridge earthquake, when at 4:31 a.m. Jan. 17, 1994, the giant jolt came. When it was all over, 57 were dead, thousands were trapped or injured, and the hospital itself sustained tens of millions of dollars in damages.
Why does it matter? Ask a person who was on staff that day.
With the new system those precious few seconds of warning could protect vulnerable patients, said Stephen Jones, an emergency physician who was at the hospital that fateful day. They could be removed from a nearby glass door or from flying debris in an operating room.
“Up in surgery, they had to cover patients that were being operated on with exposed wounds because of all of the debris flying around from breaking dry wall,” Jones said. “Surgeons actually had to bend over and cover the field. If you had a warning, even if it’s five seconds you can take a sterile drape and cover patients and help protect them from that type of injury. So, there are things to do even with only a few seconds. A minute would be nice, but we’ll see how the system works.”
Previously, hospital staff had no warning of a looming earthquake.
The only thing they could do was react.
“If a physical therapist is walking with a patient, they can have the patient sit down. If a nurse is about to give an injection, a pause can be taken,” said Susan Shamban, disaster coordinator at Dignity Health Northridge Medical Center. “Or if a physician is about to start a procedure or might be in the middle of a procedure, he can think about not starting immediately.”
On the day of the quake, hospital officials were able to set up a triage unit outside of the emergency department and began seeing patients within six minutes of the tremblor.
Within the first two hours, the hospital saw more than 100 injured patients and treated dozens more who were never logged in.
By the end of the second day 1,700 men, women and children were treated, according to hospital officials.
Twenty-one newborn and premature babies in the neonatal intensive care unit were evacuated from the fifth floor down stairwells, across shattered glass, cracked floors, damaged walls and exposed wiring.
Jones said it was amazing how they got by at that time.
The system, which costs an estimated $25,000, was free to the hospital as part of a pilot program. Northridge is said to be the only hospital in California to have it in place.
Officials have been practicing behind the scenes.
The system is expected to be fully rolled out to all of the hospital’s personnel in the next few weeks.
Since the 1994 earthquake, Northridge Hospital Medical Center has also been equipped with high-tech, earthquake-resistant, ductile iron water pipes built to withstands natural disasters such as earthquakes, landslides and drastic temperature changes.
The system is for commercial use and different from ShakeAlertLA, a cell phone recently announced that would give LA County residents an early warning.