Mid-Missouri hospitals apply lessons learned from Joplin tornado, 15 years later

JOPLIN, Mo. (KMIZ)

Friday marks 15 years since a deadly EF-5 tornado packing winds in excess of 200 mph slammed into the heart of Joplin, killing 161 people and destroying hundreds of homes and buildings, including St. John's Regional Medical Center.

The hospital suffered severe structural damage as windows were blown out across most of the building, the roof collapsed, stairwells crumbled and utilities were demolished, leaving the facility without power.

Of the 180 patients, visitors and healthcare workers, six people died in the hospital. Last Sunday, I took you inside the new Mercy Joplin, which set the standard for how new medical facilities are built to withstand natural disasters, including tornadoes.

Lessons learned from the storm were put into practice across the country and implemented in new hospitals.

"There were things that we were really the industry pioneers of that had never been done before," said Charis Trost, Mercy Health System's director of planning and design. "No Midwest hospital was really incorporating hurricane-proof, high-performance windows into their facilities."

SSM St. Mary's in Jefferson City was one of the first Mid-Missouri hospitals to adopt new storm-hardening techniques when it opened in 2014.

Emergency Preparedness Specialist Nicki Newton said SSM took those Joplin lessons into consideration when planning the new hospital.

"We talked to people who lived in Joplin, and administrators of those hospitals, as well as other sister facilities and organizations in the area, and those hospitals that are directly in that tornado alley even though it’s shifting more northeast every year, so we are starting to be in the heart of it," Newton said. "I’m glad that we’ve planned the way that we have but using those other resources for best practices really helped us get ahead of the building codes that have since been implemented."

St. Mary's has hurricane-proof glass in the windows surrounding the emergency department, and the stairwells are made of concrete blocks after it was found that the drywall crumbled at St. John's in Joplin, blocking exits for trapped healthcare workers and patients.

Maintaining power post-storm was one of the top lessons learned following the tornado. Hospitals, including University Hospital in Columbia, have several generators that are tested often and have redundancies in the event of power failure due to a storm.

"They will start and run with the slightest interruption, and we can have all emergency power within, say, 8 seconds is the maximum amount of time, but generally it’s a little quicker than that," said William Moore, the MU Health Care manager of engineering services.

Situational awareness around dangerous weather has improved since 2011. Hospitals nationwide have developed a critical incident command structure that involves local and state-level emergency response partners.

"It is something that across the country, everybody uses something very similar, and it meets those national standards. It's easy to communicate not only internally but externally as well. We all speak the same language, so to speak," said Dale Chambers, MU Health Care emergency management coordinator.

Rapidly evolving communications technology has made emergency response faster and smoother in the last decade.

"We used to have binders with quick reference guides or help guides, and now we’ve gone to where we have apps on our phones that allow employees to look quickly to see this is quick reference guide if we have a tornado or winter weather, or any type of emergency," said Joe Bayer, director of support services for Boone Hospital.

St. John's in Joplin moved to electronic patient records just before the tornado, reinforcing the need for quickly accessible information after a storm.

“Without that, when you’re on a fully paper system, you lose all of your patients medical records. So I can’t stress enough the importance of technology just from a caregiving standpoint," said Trost.

All three Mid-Missouri hospitals I sat down with stressed the importance of preparation ahead of severe weather, including regular practice drills and training, and testing of generators to keep everything running smoothly.