CRANSTON -- The U.S. Department of Justice will analyze how Rhode Island responded to the West Warwick nightclub fire, looking at what went right, what went wrong and what lessons the country can extract from the tragedy.
The "after-action report" will examine the work of "first-responders" -- police officers, doctors and nurses, ambulance crews and medical examiners, Red Cross workers and others -- state officials said at yesterday's meeting of the Rhode Island Emergency Management Council.
"From all the reports and from being on the scene, I think we handled an exceptionally difficult situation very well," said Lt. Gov. Charles J. Fogarty, the council chairman. "It certainly taxed us, but it did not overwhelm us."
Still, Fogarty said, the state and country will benefit from examining the strengths and weaknesses of the fire response. "We'll find out the things we did well and the things we could improve on in the future," he said.
Albert A. Scappaticci, executive director of the state Emergency Management Agency, said it's routine to conduct such an analysis after a disaster of this magnitude. "It's not meant to be critical," he said. "It's meant to be constructive."
Scappaticci said there's no timetable yet for the study, which will be paid for by the Department of Justice.
In an interview last week, Dr. William G. Cioffi, surgeon-in-chief at Rhode Island Hospital, said that although many aspects of the response worked well, the hospitals need a better system for communicating among themselves.
For example, no one oversaw where patients who were sent out of state were going, or no one judged whether it was necessary for them all to leave the state. Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston received many patients, while UMass/Worcester received just four, and Bridgeport Hospital in Connecticut received none.
"What we need is a system," Cioffi said, "an online, continuous evaluation of hospital resources in terms of: Is the [emergency room] open or closed? How many [intensive care unit] beds do they have available? What's their census? How many empty beds do they have?
"If we can get that into our daily practice," Cioffi said, "then during a disaster it's second nature."
Fogarty began yesterday's meeting by noting that much had happened since the council last met: not only did 99 people die in The Station nightclub fire, but just days before the blaze, the state was hit by one of the 10 worst snowstorms in the past century. And now the nation is at war with Iraq.
As a result, the council heard briefings on a range of activity.
Dr. Walter S. Combs Jr., the state Health Department's environmental-health director, said The Station fire delayed the process of vaccinating health-care workers against smallpox in case of a bioterrorism attack. "There were a lot of victims in the hospitals with severe burns," he said. "And burns and the vaccinating virus don't go together, so we delayed the start of the vaccination program."
The program has since started, Combs said, but the state has decided to defer vaccines for people with cardiac problems because two health-care workers died after receiving the vaccine in Maryland and Florida.
"We want to make this safe," Combs said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it is investigating whether there is a connection between the smallpox vaccination and reports of heart problems in seven health-care workers who have been vaccinated. The seven cases included three heart attacks, two cases of chest pain, and two cases of inflammation of the heart muscle or heart sac.
Federal scientists say it's not clear if that number is higher than would be expected normally. More than 25,000 people have been vaccinated as part of the federal program.
The state's chief of energy and community services, Janice M. McClanaghan, told the council, "Oil prices have not jumped to the extreme we expected with war jitters, but they have fluctuated all over the place." And she said she expects heating oil and gasoline prices to continue fluctuating "until things settle down."
McClanaghan said the world is losing 1.7 million barrels of oil per day because of the war in Iraq and 800,000 barrels per day because of ethnic violence in Nigeria. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia is stepping up its production to 9.3 million barrels per day, and Venezuela is back to full production at 2.5 million barrels per day, she said.
As of Monday, average gasoline prices in Rhode Island had dropped to $1.719 per gallon, down 3 cents from the prior week, and the average price of heating oil fell to $1.769 per gallon, down 17 cents from the prior week, McClanaghan said.
John J. Enright, director of counterterrorism and law enforcement initiatives for the U.S. Attorney's office, told the council, "We don't have any specific threats in Rhode Island or the region."
Enright said an antiterrorism task force is improving communications between the nation's law-enforcement agencies. "We're getting information more quickly," he said, joking that "We are beating CNN to the punch."
Fogarty said, "When you beat Al-Jazeera, then we'll really be impressed."
With reports from Journal Medical Writer Felice J. Freyer
