Disaster preparedness

Betty's husband used to be in the military, now he works at the local airport, I'm not sure in which capacity. Yesterday we discussed disasters, since NACs are expected to know the disaster preparedness plan at the facilities where they work and know what is expected of them should one occur. (Maybe a NACs job would to be to get on the phone and call the next shift's RNs and NACs in early.) Betty asked the class for examples of disasters, so people said "earthquakes, volcanoes, terrorist attacks..." Betty said, "and we live close to an airport." I wasn't sure where she was going with this. Like, a plane drops out of the sky onto the city and causes a disaster? She told us that each local hospital has a command center with a red phone manned 24/7. I'm not sure if the phone's color was a figure of speech. One of the hospitals works as an uber-command-center for the rest of them, so that in case of an emergency, it can quickly be determined which hospitals have how many beds, how many can be made available in X amount of time, how many operating rooms can be up and running quickly... I asked if the need to use this system had ever arisen here. "All the time." "Why don't we hear about it on the news?"

So then she told a story. Back in her 20s, she'd run away from home (clearly that was all resolved later--the first day of class she mentioned caring for her Daddy when he was dying). She was living at the YWCA in Memphis and didn't have a car or 2 pennies to rub together, so she walked to the local AT&T office (then Southern Bell) without any identifying papers whatsoever, and got a job as a long-distance operator--headset, cords, plugs, the works. If the person next to her was missing, she'd scoot her chair in-between their two stations and work two switchboards. (At this point in Betty's story, Judy piped up that she'd done the same job back in the day, as well.) Betty worked a split shift: 10am-2pm, 10pm-2am. So she'd walk along Beale Street between work and the YWCA multiple times a day. One day she went into work and after a while, the whole switchboard lit up. She thought it was on fire at first. No one could get through to anyone. She finally found out that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. After working for what felt like days and was likely 18 hours, she walked home in a daze, and said it was like a war zone outside. When she got back to the YWCA she went up onto the roof where the other women were gathered, because from that vantage point, they could see the Lorraine Motel, and the window of what had been MLK's room. Police were milling about. Anyway, Betty's convinced that, as awful as it was that MLK was killed, the panic and chaos that followed his death compounded the tragedy, with people's reactions making things worse.

So, she said, bringing it back to our local airport, stuff happens here all the time, and it's dealt with efficiently and safely, and it never shows up on the news, because that wouldn't be helpful or productive, since people's reactions would make things worse. I find that thought creepy. Like what? Airplane crashes we're not hearing about? I'd love to figure out what's not making it to the news that's of enough concern to make multiple hospitals coordinate bed and operating-room availability.