‘Everybody out': Hospital evacuates in 3 hours as California wildfire spreads

Staff at the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa, California, used whatever was at their disposal—including their own cars—to help patients quickly evacuate when massive wildfires quickly spread close to the hospital. At the same time she was helping those patients, nurse Julayne Smithson’s new home was burning down.

Before the evacuation began, she managed to race home to grab whatever she could with the fire just a block away.

“I knew I didn’t have much time,” Smithson told KQED. “So I ran inside and I thought, ‘I have to get my nursing documents, because if I’m going to lose everything I own, I have to be able to work, to care for patients.’”

Smoke filled the hospital over the next two hours, leading police to order “everybody out,” Smithson said. Their 130 patients had to be moved in several ways—aboard a bus for patients who could walk, ambulances for those who couldn’t or nurses loading patients into their own cars, even carrying some on blankets.

“It’s a really challenging decision to make, one you don’t make lightly,” said Joshua Weil, MD, the emergency medicine physician in charge that night. “You have to weigh the potential risk of moving hospitalized patients and patients from the emergency department, versus the risk of keeping them where they are.”

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