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Doctors' disaster training tested by Rhode Island nightclub fire

Drills can't capture the emotional magnitude, but doctors and hospitals knew what to do.

By Damon Adams, amednews staff. March 17, 2003.

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A phone call from Kent Hospital jolted Thomas G. Germano, MD, from sleep. He was needed in the emergency department.

As Dr. Germano drove on Interstate 95 to his Rhode Island hospital, the many ambulances he saw led to the unsettling realization that a disaster was unfolding.

A deadly fire, which investigators believe was sparked by a band's pyrotechnics, engulfed The Station nightclub in West Warwick, R.I., about three miles from Kent Hospital. Dr. Germano and scores of other physicians rushed to hospitals to treat victims of the fire -- the state's deadliest and one of the nation's worst nightclub blazes.

Many doctors were about to experience their first mass-casualty disaster of this magnitude. Ninety-six people died at the nightclub, and more than 180 were injured and treated at Rhode Island and Massachusetts hospitals.

"The whole place smelled of smoke. All the floors were wet from saline," said Dr. Germano, an emergency physician. "At the end, I had to throw away my white coat, it was so filthy with blood and fluid secretions. The volume of the people and the severity was nothing like anything I'd ever seen."

Although the doctors had practiced handling disasters, some struggled to keep emotions in check when waves of burn victims kept arriving.

"The extent of the facial burns -- it was very sad. You just sort of focus in on treating people. You try to remain objective," said John A. McCue, MD, assistant chief of the emergency medicine department at Kent Hospital, which treated 63 victims in the first few hours. "Many of the nurses and secretarial staff knew people killed in the fire."