Field hospitals set up to treat North Carolina storm victims sit mostly empty

Health care companies and nonprofit organizations have set up fully equipped field hospitals in North Carolina already preparing to treat residents in case they get injured by the hurricane Helene.

However, only a handful of patients had turned up on Friday at the large, white tent hospital arranged by Samaritan’s Purse, an international charitablemission organization opened by evangelical preacher Franklin Graham, in the towns of Newland and Linville in the Blue Ridge Mountains about 140 miles northwest of Greensboro.

There was also a little movement at the well-facilitated field hospital by Atrium Health in the town of Tryon, about 50 miles southeast of Asheville and near the South Carolina border.

FEMA said it has trucks fitted with refrigeration which can hold several dozens of bodies and are ready for use as the death toll continues to rise. Out of the 215 people who lost their lives to the Hurricane Helene by Friday, at least 110 died in North Carolina where heavy flooding tore through houses, washed away roads and bridges and claimed lives.

The lead nurse, Wendy Henson of the Atrium facility averred that it has the capacity to “help a local hospital in need if they are experiencing a problem, and in the same breath, the facility can replace a small hospital if at all it has been wiped out.”

She said there has been a few patients who have visited the Atrium site since it opened on Monday and said they treated some patients for ‘general illness and some trauma’.

“But we are ready to go and we’re hoping to get the word out,” Henson said.

Henson pointed that interruptions in electricity supply and destroyed WiFi and communications have limited outreach work greatly.

”I know that there are a lot of people that still don’t have power, still don’t have forms of communication,” she said. These are some of the remarks of the==='I said to him: Perhaps there are cases when people just disappeared, and you have to struggle to find a way to get to them in order to help them know that there are others who are ready to meet their needs.’ 

One of the plans they have in mind he said, was to approach the local AM radio stations for assistance.

“We’ve got a team dedicated and working very diligently trying to get that done on the back end,” she said.

Waving in the direction of the high-tech gear lying in the spacious and high-tech basis of the mobile hospital parked in the huge field, Henson said to her and the narrator, “We can do anything.” We have operating capacities that are fully functional and performing.” 

The Samaritan’s Purse was established in the parking lot of the Charles A. Cannon Jr., Memorial Hospital in Linville.

Sasha Thew, an emergency medical response specialist with Samaritan’s Purse said that it wanted to stay put and be ready to assist the hospital if necessary.

“We really set this up as an overflow to give us some extra space to cover some spikes,” Thew said. ”It also stated that this area is to serve as search and rescue deposit zone.”

She said that if the hospital were to turn into a heavily populated center, they would be capable of doing so.

“And if there was a surge, there were a lot of patients coming, the hospital requested that we ensure there was that ability to, in effect, have some spillover,” Thew said.

The first appointment that a patient would meet would be a triage with a capacity of eight beds complete with monitor and oxygen tank.

When the situation is a bit more serious, Thew said the patients would be either sent to the ER on its hospital or be transported to its 20 bed ‘in-patient tent’ where there is a male and female ward.

Thew said Samaritan’s Purse also has a list of stand-by physicians ready to be deployed whenever needed. But so far, that kind of expertise has not been required.

Thew said all the patients she has been attending had minor injuries, out of medications or have lost them, or out of oxygen cylinders.

Rebecca Rudisill aCommunication student and Red Cross volunteer from Lincoln county was found in the field hospital section after she injured her leg in a restaurant where she had gone for dinner.

“I am angry because the truth is I came here for a reason to assist but I can’t” she added. 

Even as the field hospitals resulted in no patients, S & R teams across this region were still dwelling to look for survivors and casualties. Authorities stated that there were still hundreds of persons unaccounted for.

On Tuesday, a FEMA official said this at a briefing, It reiterated that the agency is planning for the worst by securing pop-up morgues, which are actually refrigerated trucks that can hold bodies once traditional morgues are filled up.

‘It is not for signaling a mass casualty event,’ the FEMA representative said, ‘It is just a measure if something goes wrong’. ‘However we do not as yet have a terminal location where the above described facility would be placed and so it will be transferred to staging on for transfer with the state in consultation with the state.’