Valued Voice

Health Care Emergency Readiness Planning: Wildfire Disaster Response

Note - as part of its role in facilitating the exchange of information between health care partners, WHA is running a series of articles highlighting the emergency planning resources available on asprtracie.hhs.gov.

The haze and air quality alerts covering Wisconsin and a large number of other states recently from persistent Canadian wildfires is a good reminder of the role hospitals and other parts of the emergency response team play when wildfires create an emergency response event. ASPR Tracie has a new learning series on the destructive 2021 wildfire in Marshall, Colorado available as a resource to assist emergency planning. 

As the video series explains, the fire led to evacuations of 35,000 individuals with little to no time to grab personal belongings. It also threatened a number of residential care facilities and hospitals, forcing evacuations of vulnerable and critically sick patients into a health care system that was already stressed in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic's omicron surge. 

The series includes four videos from the perspective of Fire and EMS responders, the hospital evacuation team, residential community evacuation teams, and efforts provided for regional coordination teams. These entities came together to respond to what is to date the most destructive fire in Colorado's history.  

You can find the video series here.