As Camp fire flames closed in, Paradise nursing home staff leaps to action — saving 91 lives
How do you evacuate a nursing home when the deadliest wildfire in California history is bearing down and there are 91 men and women to move to safety - patients in need of walkers or wheelchairs or confined to hospital beds, suffering from dementia, recovering from strokes?
The fire is coming fast. Help is not.
Staying at the Cypress Meadows Post-Acute center in Paradise is not an option. Sheltering in place means certain death for the 30 or so staff members on hand and the patients who rely on them. A fleet of vans that might have helped ferry them to safety has been turned back because of the danger.
Sheila Craft, director of admissions and marketing at Cypress Meadows, has to find 91 beds within driving distance of this small town in the Sierra foothills. And she has to find them now.
Frantic search for beds
On a typical day, there are waiting lists to get a bed at a skilled nursing home or memory care center or assisted living facility. This is not a typical day.
The fire starts about 6:30 a.m. Nov. 8, about 8 miles of rugged terrain away from the nursing home. Craft sees smoke an hour later, while driving her four kids to school in this woodsy town where all of them were born.
She spots flames in the distance as she heads to Cypress Meadows. By 7:45 a.m., she is at her desk, working the phones.
“I was calling every facility around, ‘Hey, we're getting evacuated, this is happening, I don't know if you've watched the news, but how many beds do you have available?'?” Craft said. “So they'd tell me, ‘Four females and two males.' ‘OK, I'm putting you down, I'll take 'em.' Then I called another facility, ‘How many beds do you have available?'
“So, I've got one phone in this ear, calling, finding residents homes or beds, and the other phone in this ear with my 12-year-old seventh-grader standing in front of her gym with a plume of smoke, going, ‘Mom, I have to be picked up. We're being evacuated.' I'm, ‘OK, I'm gonna get somebody to you. You stay right there. Don't move.'?”
‘Full evacuation mode'
By the time Olivia Drummond arrives at work at 8 a.m., Cypress Meadows is “in full evacuation mode,” a process that is fraught even for the able- bodied gathering their own things and their own loved ones and leaving their own homes under their own steam.
The fire is growing.
The medical records director bags each patient's documents, paperwork that describes who they are, how to reach their next of kin, what drugs they should take, the care they will want when they are dying. A medication nurse bags each one's drugs. A certified nursing assistant puts together a change of clothes.
Patients are dressed and seated in wheelchairs. Bags with their drugs and clothes and paperwork are tied to the chair handles.
“We pulled them out of the rooms,” said Drummond, Cypress Meadows' director of social services. “Our plan was to get the rooms emptied and close the door. Once the door was closed, we knew there was no resident in there.”
That way, no one would be left behind as flames licked the rafters and made their way through the nursing home's wings.
The first 40 patients, the most ambulatory and easiest to move, head out about 9:30 a.m. Then comes an order to shelter in place. Patients who had been queued up in wheelchairs outside are rolled back into the dining area, away from the growing toxic smoke.
Just before 10 a.m., Drummond said, authorities arrive and say, “You gotta go.” Staff members line up their cars to ferry patients out. The wheelchairs are abandoned.
Finding a way through fire
Drummond helps her daughter, Sarah, a dietary technician at the home, load two patients into her Ford Focus. Sarah is 19. The last thing Drummond's husband tells her: “Don't separate from Sarah.”
But on this terrible Thursday morning, she has no choice.
Drummond is 4½ months pregnant. She had planned to take the passenger seat. But one of the patients needs it because she doesn't fit in back. And Drummond can't squeeze in either. So she sends the car down the hill.
Sarah will not be heard from for the next 10 hours. Her parents won't know if she and her passengers made it out alive.
Craft pulls her white Chevrolet Suburban to the Cypress Meadows entrance. She's not a nurse, so she will be driving patients who do not need complicated care. Two women and a man - one stroke victim, two with Alzheimer's disease.
They are headed to Roseleaf, a memory care facility in Chico, about 16 miles away, a 30-minute drive when the world's not ablaze. On this day, it will take nearly seven hours.
Craft pulls into gridlock headed south. She considers piloting her truck down a bike path and through a trailer park. But the bike path is on fire. She sees there are no cars in a northbound lane, so she takes it, heading south - and then comes upon flames at an intersection.
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