Why Boston's Hospitals Were Ready

In Tampa, we run annual mass casualty drills. One part is a field exercise where fire rescue practice triage and transportation of a large number of patients. They usually use high school students, often with makeup for their injuries. I've been at a few of those and it's pretty creepy to see a mock disaster like that at the airport or in a sports arena.

They also simultaneously have an exercises with all of the local hospitals and other medical facilities. They all run their disaster plans and practice triage, reporting available surgical beds / trauma units, etc. The bigger hospitals actually handle some of the mock patients from the scene, but even small day surgery facilities take part in at least a paper exercise, since they could be tremendously useful in a real event.

Here's a decent news report about last year's drill here: http://www.abcactionnews.com/dpp/news/health/hospital-staff-...

Much the same happened when the Joplin, MO tornado hit a couple of years ago, e.g. http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-... (warning, a front line account with some ugly events and outcomes) and many more stories.

E.g. at the other end of the scale, at the opposite end of tow is the local college with has a nursing program ... and for some inexplicable reason every bed in every room is fully functional once you remove the training dummy (12 to 20 or so). A pharmacist and some junior associates shows up from fairly far south of the city and set up a pharmacy. It was discovered that dental chairs for that training program were rather good for setting bones. Etc.

Or something closer to home: there's a state association of structural engineers, which had a plan for this sort of thing, and marshalled over a hundred to get the not so destroyed buildings graded in a very short time (as in "safe" to "stay out").