DMAT San Diego CA-4 * December 2003 Newsletter
*****
Volume 12, Number 12 *****
A
deployable Disaster Medical Assistance Team. Affiliated with the National
Disaster Medical System. Founded 1991
DMAT San Diego CA-4 is a public benefit, non-profit 501(c)3 corporation.,
registered in the State of
California
and with the IRS.
Co-Sponsored
by: UCSD
Medical Center & International Relief Teams
Mailing Address: 200 West Arbor Drive, San Diego, CA 92103-8676
DMAT CA-4 Information Line: 619-543-6216
eMail address of Newsletter Editor,
Jake Jacoby:
ca4cdr@san.rr.com
DMAT CA-4 WEB site: http://www.dmatca4.org
CONTENTS
Calendar
Of Events..........................................Page 1
Commander's Log.......................................... .Page 2
Update on Logistics .........................................Page 2
Minutes, Nov, 2003 team meeting.......................Page 4
*****
CALENDAR of EVENTS:
DMAT CA-4
HOLIDAY PARTY/Open House
*
Wednesday,
December 17, 2003
5:30 PM
-9:00 PM
at our
Ops
Center
TEAM MEMBERS
are authorized to bring up to 2 mangers or supervisors from their work. We
welcome member's employers, since we rely on them to get you deployed!
. Please either have them RSVP to Zona, or you can RSVP to her for them.
email address: zwahrenbrock@san.rr.com
You can also bring your significant other.
Additional VIPs have been invited. DMAT members urged to wear their team shirts,
so visitors can see who the members are.
This is a great time for members who have been inactive, to come out and see
our Ops
Center for the first time, and maybe rejoin our activities.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL, & to All a Happy New Year without Disasters.
*
Next Team
meeting --
Wed., January 28, 2004
@ 1800 hrs.
Where? DMAT San Diego CA-4 Operations Center
8830-G Rehco Road,
San Diego
*NDMS Annual Meeting,
Dallas, TX
Apr. 17-21, 2004.
The 12th Annual Tri-Service
Combat Stress Conference dates are 30 April (Friday) through 6 May (Thursday)
2004 at the San Luis Rey Officers Club, Camp Pendleton. Conference segment 1-2
May; Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) certification courses 3-4 May
and 5-6 May.
*****
REMINDERS: Make sure to
submit your nomination for member of the year.
*****
Commander's Log
The holiday season is upon
us, This is a time to reflect on our activities, our goals in medical care, and
our expectations for the future. The activities of DMAT CA-4 are ongoing. The
frenzy of getting ready for an overnight exercise.... Back to Basics 03, at
March Air Reserve Base... was clearly a major effort, to get ready, to prepare
for our organizational, teaching and training tasks, and an opportunity to get
comfortable with what goes into a disaster deployment. Here is a stream of
thoughts that might have run thru your brain at some time preparing for the
participating in that weekend.... Picking what personal items might be
needed for a deployment ... Making sure you had everything....and always
remembering the things you wished you had brought, but didn't. The hard work..
loading the truck, long drives, heat. Taking our load off the truck, putting
up the tents, staking them down...why do we do these things? Things will be
fine.... The tents won't blow away...Trying to figure out the different venues
at a new place for some, but an old site for others. Sleeping in a tent with
17 other people. Some might be strangers, to the newer members... And
lots of old friends from deployments and exercises past for the "veterans."
Why didn't I bring some sort of easy-wear night clothes? Even scrubs would have
been great. Why didn't I listen and bring a headlamp instead of a flashlight?
Saturday afternoon came, and then of a sudden, things are happening,
the air is bad, the temperature and the wind is really hot.!!.. the wind
picks up, the fire is just over the hills to the west.... The sand is
blowing, feels like getting sandblasted. Tents are threatened by the high
winds, did they get staked down?. ..with enough stakes? Were the floors
attached correctly? How many stakes are enough? So we go to help out.
Staking tents. Spreading sandbags around on all the tents. Do we have
particulate masks to allow us to breathe out there? Whose idea was it anyway to
put our tents up in such a sandy area, during
Santa Ana season?
It wasn't this way at our last exercise in August, at the Navy Sub base.
News is in the air... late at night and early in the morning. Wildfires in San
Diego have begun to kickup in east county.. and north county, spreading
quickly. How did people find out? Cell phone calls to and from home..Whose
home is threatened? Who has to evacuate? What about my home? What about our ops
center? How can we go to training classes when real stuff is happening, and we
need to know about it, and make decisions?
The rest is
now history. We should be better for it. We were trainees, we were trainers.
Then we were almost victims.. Some of us may have been victims. Sounds like a
disaster. But we are better for it. Humbled by reality.
Many thanks to Sara Ontiveros for all the effort she put into the
planning of Back to Basics 2003; Your participation certificates from the State
of CA EMSA have arrived, and I will have them to distribute at the
holiday Open House.
Update on Logistics :
1) Two time clocks for the Kubota generators were purchased. Gene Adkins
is picking them up from the supply house and bringing them down from
Escondido. They will be available at ops center soon for installation
on our Kubotas.
2) The replacement weather cap for the badly damaged one has been received and
is in the warehouse. We will retire the older one which was significantly bent
out of shape. New springs for securing the caps to the tent have also been
received for the older tent weather caps. If the older weather caps and tent
crowns do not have holes, for the springs to fit, they will need to have holes
drilled in them, in order to accommodate the springs to avoid their blowing
loose in extreme conditions, as were seen at Back To Basics on other tents.
Tent items are now located in a specific TENT SUPPLY shipping crate, in the
#400 series. For those who always ask, the weather caps for the tents do not
have a flutter flap on them/ they are perfectly fine for use. The ones with the
flutter flaps are in case someone wants to use a heater that requires a Flue,
and that is where the flu can extend up thru the roof. Since we don't use a
flue, we really don't need the weather caps with the flutter flaps on them, we
just happen to have them as they came with the original tent shipment. 3)
Many thanks to the team members who assisted in getting started with the
cleaning and tent floor repairs at last work party. Thanks to Jay Thompson
for completing our commo inventory, and thanks to all others who assisted on the
inventory.
4) I have assigned a GRAY NDMS Property tracking tag to the forklift, as it remains
federal property because it cost more than $2,500.00. It must be tracked in our
inventory. It was listed in the submitted inventory.[the BLACK US Govt
property tags are affixed to many items, but they are not tracked currently by
NDMS--that may change, and thus we are going to list ALL tracking numbers in
the inventory log, whether they are black or gray, for our inventory purposes.
If an item has both a gray one and a black one, the GRAY
one will be reported on the inventory form, as they are all unique numbers and
should not cause confusion.The GRAY inventory stickers are the priority ones,
for high-priced or valued or security items, while we are free to place the
BLACK US Govt. numbered stickers on any item we want to track.
5) I have completed the 2003 inventory and it has been submitted to NDMS, as of
Nov 10th. It was about 6 wks later than the deadline. I have since added to it
some of our team owned property, which also must be maintained on the inventory.
As soon as all team items are added, the inventory will be updated to NDMS.
(Loretta McGill is our logs liaison for our team).
6) I did go through almost all the boxes again to retrieve expiration dates for
many of the expendible supplies...Government tracking numbers are listed in the
spreadsheet. The master copy of this inventory is on one of the Team's Laptops.
I have sent copies to many of you. It is expected that this inventory master
will be updated and maintained throughout the year, whenever new items are
received., whether they be federal or team opened property. And if items are
expended, such as MREs recently for the Back to Basics Exercise, these will
then need to be immediately reflected in the inventory master. Planning is
underway to get this onto a controlled, secure section of our web site in the
near future. Until it is available on the web, if you have not received a copy
of it, please let me know and I will resend it to you as an excel file.
7) I will be
interviewing outside logistics personnel to hire an outside contractor, to work
10 hours per week on a regular basis, over the year, to maintain the inventory
and cache, since too many things were not completed through our all-volunteer
system in a timely fashion, and we now have the funding support from NDMS to do
so, as a recognized need for our team. This is becoming even more important as
FEMA takes over NDMS.FEMA has been is highly logistics oriented,and will I am
sure be making changes in the near future as to how we do business on the DMATs.
Until such person is chosen, I will be the acting Logistic Director. Larry
Griffin is still our Supply/Property Manager.
8) Each of the full-time and part-time logistics folks on our team should still
be aware they they may be called upon to be a Logistics officer for a deployment
for our team, and could be made available to other teams if they are short a
logistics person for a deployment. In addition we may have other logistics
responsibilities during exercises or state-related deployments, such as for the
recent Wildfire Medical support activation.
---Jake Jacoby
Nov 19, 2003 CA-4 Team Meeting Minutes
I.
Greetings
Everyone was asked to introduce themselves and new visitors were welcomed.
-Commander's Report/updates:
1)Personal:-Loretta McGill (Logistic for NDMS assigned to our team) lost
her husband about 2 months ago. Jake passed around a sympathy card for team
members to sign for Loretta during her difficult time.
-A BIG THANKS was extended to Kevin Spuhler who put away boxes, put up
dry marker board, secured shelves for books.. etc. and cleaned up the DMAT Op
Center over the past weekend.
*There are now 38 Deployable DMAT teams (used to be 21 teams) nationwide.
2)Submissions for month:
-Inventory:-Jake received the inventory list on a CD. The updated
inventory list has expiration date listings -Jake will
make the file available to team members. The file size is 1.4 MB on Excel 2000
-Schedule of Training for 2003:
-Jake reported that the schedule of training for
the remainder of 2003 had been submitted on Nov 19,2003
-Jake reported that the Federal fund of $125,000 was held up for 2 weeks due to
inventory was not ready to submit to NDMS on time. CA-4 have 70 deployable
members, we need to maintain our cache, MREs, and be compliance with policy and
procedure
-Jake announced that San Diego County CMS GERM
Commission presented a symposium on SARS sponsored by Sharp Healthcare and the
SD County Medical Society will be presenting "SARS: What you need to
know" symposium on Tue Dec 2, 2003 at Mission Valley Hilton, Carmel Room
901 Camino Del Rio South, SD, CA 92108 Buffet dinner begins at 5:30 pm;
presentation from 6:40-8:40 pm .Registration required by Nov 27,2003 Call SDCMS
at 858-565-8888 Cost $25.00
Speakers: Dr. Arjun Srinivasan MD Infectious Disease CDC
Dr. Allison McGeer Microbiologist, Mt Sinai Hospital, Toronto, Ont.
II.
Exercise After Action Reviews
1)
Operation BACK to BASICS
-Jake reported that on Oct 24 through Oct 26, 2003 EMSA CA sponsored
the annual exercise "Operation Back to Basics" for DMATs in CA and with
out-of-state participants from DMATs in NV, MN, and OR.
-Operation Back to Basics was a comprehensive review of basic skills, tent
and patient treatment sites set up, mission support team (MST) training
-On Sat Oct 25 due to the Santa Ana wind and dust storm, metal weather
caps on top of half a dozen of the 20 tents that had been put up , blew off,
causing unsafe condition for participants. Tent city was temporarily shut down
and participants were evacuated to a hanger until the wind quieted down. The
outdoor training sessions were canceled, and the issue of CE credits is
uncertain at this time.
-Overall this
was a good exercise for MST to control and manage the exercise. There were 6
people trained who can work with Western MST from Sacramento during deployment
-On Sun morning Oct 26 due to residence evacuations from the wildfires
back in San Diego, several members of our team and CA-2's team left early to
tend to their homes and family members.
2) San Diego & San Bernardino Counties Wildfire Medical Support
-CA Wildfire Medical Support was set up through CA-6 with CDF.
CA-4 team members deployed to the wildfire medical support were Deanna Polk,
Michael Martinka, Beverly Fitzgerald, Jeff Keely, Leia Mehlman, & Adele
Schwartz.
- After Action report forms for the wildfire-deployed team members to fill
out were distributed.
-Deanna Polk gave a short report on her deployment-
-Most treatments were for burns, sililates, poison oak, insect bites,
dehydration, "camp gut," and wet feet
-Pharmaceutical cache was inadequate due to the cache being divided
among 3 sites
-Security and communication were also inadequate; one pharmaceutical
cache was late to arrive, CA-4 arranged for pain meds through Fallbrook
Hospital, drugs arrived at Valley Center on 10/27 Monday at 2 am, Great
advantage in dropping Peggy Perkins' name.
-Beverly Fitzgerald presented CA-4 with a copy of CD photos from Lakeside
fire, photos and maps from CDF, including one of historic fires in the area.
III. Old
Business
1) County
of San Diego Contract for Study of Hospital Bed Surge capacity
-Jake reported that the Surge capacity study is in the draft form, and is being
put into publishable format with references
-Jake reported that the Hospital Bed Surge capacity Study is the number
one issue the Federal and State government are looking into; our report will be
submitted to the county in 2-3 weeks, if there are no further snafus.
2) Skills Training Day
-Jake reported that the Skills Training day is being tentatively planned for
Sat, Jan 17,2004; plans are being considered to have quarterly skills
training day on quarterly schedule, due to the turnover of team members.
-Tentative schedule for skills training
day is June and Oct. April 17-21 is NDMS Conference in Dallas
3) Harvard Medical Int'l Manual of Disaster Medicine
-Jake reported that the second shipment has not arrived, and one team
member has not picked up the book from the first shipment of quantities of 25.,
2nd order was for 15 more manuals. [Ed. note: books from 2nd order are now in
and you can arrange with me to pickup your copies].
IV.
Committee Reports
1)Administrative Officer (Zona)
-Zona reported that 100 uniforms were purchased. There will be forms
to sign out uniforms to take to the uniform store: GALLS INCORPORATED
LONG BEACH UNIFORM, 8841 Claremont Mesa Blvd., San Diego, CA 92123
voice: 858-505-1900
fax: 858-505-1940
http://www.galls.com/index.jsp
-Jake reminded team members to have TAPE changed from USPHS to NDMS
on uniforms, and each member should remove their own old tape before having the
new tape sewn on uniforms at Galls or other stores
-Zona reminded team members to pay dues and submit copy of the current
license; exchanged new ID cards with old ones
-Zona reported that there are 50 direct deposit forms missing; and she
urged team members to do so if they want to be able to deploy in the
future. -Zona passed out roster for team members to update
-Zona passed out notices for NDMS Conference from April 17-21, 2004 in
Dallas, Texas
2)Communications (Jay Thompson)
-Jay reported that the communication equipment room is coming along;
FEMA has cut the budget down to almost nothing, there will be no overtime and
NDMS just hired a third communication person to help with the workload
3)Financial (Jake
Jacoby)
-Jake reported that there will be a formal audit of balance sheet through June
30 by CPA
-end of fiscal year tax forms and end of the year statement are being
prepared, records and info have already been passed to the accounting firm which
processes our team financial paperwork (Hinzman
-Currently
CA-4 team bank account has a balance of $64,000;
4)Fund raising (Sylvia Martinez,
Susana Leung)-
nothing to report
-
5)Logistics (Jake
Jacoby, Acting Director)
-Jake reported that Chuck Perkins had resigned after 7 years serving as
Logistics Director. A BIG THANKS TO CHUCK FOR HIS TIME, HARD WORK, AND
LOYALTY TO CA-4
-Jake reported that the plan is to hire a logistic person to work
10-15 hours per week; and we do need to have three logistic chiefs available
for deployment
6)Nursing (Peggy Perkins)- no report
7)Pharmacy Committee (Michael
Sohmer)
-Michael reported that he participated at the State Hospital Drill at Sharp
Chula Vista involving setting up Mass Treatment tent at the hospital
-He participated at the SD County Operation Safeguard Exercise involving
flu shot administration for the mass flu outbreak scenario
8)Safety Committee (open)
9)Supply/Property Management (Larry Griffin) - no report.
-Absent.
10)Tactical Strike Team Committee (Sal
Ruiz)
-Sal reported that Coast Guard has paid EMTs on
the budget, so there could be a problem with overlapping service utilizing
DMAT CA-4
-Sal reported that Immigration Custom Enforcement being part of DHS and
has no money, no medical coverage; DMAT CA-4 could have a working relationship
with the agency
11)Training (Sara Ontiveros)
-Sara reported that EMT/Paramedic competency needs to be completed
-Jake reminded team members to complete the first block of core training
program in a timely fashion. Our work plan requires us to have 35% of all our
members finish the Core Curriculum, and we are currently at less than 5%.
12)Web site Committee (John Johnson,
Michael Sohmer)
-Michael reported that Volunteer member of the year nomination form will be
available on line; paid up members could vote on line (deadline is
Dec 31, 2003).
V. New
Business
1) Planning Section - Jake reported that CA-4 needs to be in compliance with
ICS, team members interested in helping out please email Jake; FEMA has a
self-study ICS c course on the web
2)Operation Section - Jake relayed current information regarding
VMAT-4 to the team.
- Dec 17 Wed at the Op Center we will have a holiday party
instead of meeting, Sara Ontiveros is organizing the party committee and
volunteers should please email Sara. Each member should be bringing something to
support the Open house/Holiday Party, list will be sent out by Sara
Ontiveros of items needeed.. Each team member can invite two persons who
are their supervisors or owners of the businesses they work at, to demonstrate
how important we thing their contribution is by allowing their employees to
deploy and participate in exercises. Make sure to RSVP to Zona, with how
many people are coming.
VI. Work
Party
-Jake reported that volunteers are needed to help repair the floors of Tent
1,2,& 3 to replace the torn cords; and there were 5 volunteers who could stay
to help.
VII.
Adjourn at 7:30 pm
-Payment of Dues - see Zona
-Sale of Team Shirts, sweatshirts - see Carla
-Sign out Federal uniforms - see Lois.
Minutes prepared and submitted by Susana Leung
--
Irving "Jake" Jacoby, MD, FACP, FACEP
Team Leader, DMAT San Diego CA-4
Attending Physician, Dept. of Emergency Medicine, UCSD Medical Center, San
Diego, CA
Associate Director, UCSD Hyperbaric Medicine Center, San Diego, CA
Clinical Professor of Medicine, UCSD School of Medicine, La Jolla, CA
200 West Arbor Drive
San Diego, CA 92103-8676
Telephone: 619-543-6216
FAX: 619-543-3115
Pager: 619-290-2700
eMail:<ca4cdr@san.rr.com>
DMAT CA-4 24 hour STATUS/Information Line: 619-543-6216