Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 9

9 SECTION 1 CHICAGO TRIBUNE SEPTEMBER 12, 2001 WEDNESDAY U.S. UNDER ATTACK AT THE FRONT-LINE TRAUMA CENTER 4 5 rx A victim of Tuesday's attack on the TTTT i Va 11 I 4. k' P. the street in New York. Rescue Tf World Trade Center is treated on Tl New York Times photo by Ruth Fremsorf crews plan to accelerate their excavation of the twin towers Wednesday.

lnidDSMitai tan awaits wave peril at towers slows rescue efforts A 1 sfW' 7 1 had been caught in the subset quent collapse of the buildings. Asked what he would tell those who want to seek revenge, for the attack, he said, "If we keep hitting each other, it will never stop. But we have to do the! first thing first, which is to help people." Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said, "We have a lot of hospitals and we're using them," referring to the city's 170 hospitals. He said the city also is prepared to use medical facilities in neighboring Long Island, New Jersey; and Connecticut if necessary. reality York gathered Polaroid instant cameras to photograph the dead and injured, which should make identification quicker.

The federal government mobilized medical examiners and support staff to help in the grim job. Some countries use mass burials or cremations when naf-ural disasters or tragedies strike. But medical examiners in the United States are committed to identifying each body and protecting personal property. At the same time, said Scott Carrier, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner, "There's only so much the medical examiner's office can handle." Marlene Cimons and Jonathan Peterson are staff writers for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune newspaper AP photo by Louis Lanzano. injured firefighter outside New York's Beth Israel Medical Center.

treated, about 50 were in critical condition and three had died. Two of those succumbed to smoke inhalation; the other was crushed to death, said Dr. Leonard Bakalchuk, speaking for the hospital. The hospital stopped taking blood donations Tuesday night. Despite the shortage in the city, officials said, long lines of hundreds of eager donors had overcome the hospital's ability to process the blood.

Bakalchuk said St. Vincent's prepared to receive victims of the catastrophe essentially by "moving the hospital into the emergency room." He said he expected to see more patients arrive Wednesday, when rescue workers expected to acculerate their excavation of the site and search for survivors. Also tending to families Nearby, the hospital had set up a family information center in a ground-floor space donated by New School University. Counselors and mental health professionals sat at tables that lined the room; none was without clients. Other workers there took names of people's missing loved ones and tried to match 4 scat Emergency workers tend to an tell me to check back again," she said, sobbing.

Michelle Brown, 32, came to the hospital looking for the brother-in-law of a worried out-of-town friend. "So, I'm here looking for him. She's sitting by the phone and she's hysterical," she said of her friend. 'If just devastating' Inside the information center, Brown said, "It's so horrible. There's so many people inside.

It's just devastating. I was sitting next to a woman who was looking for her husband." Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson activated the National Disaster Medical System, preparing medical teams nationwide to assist local areas in responding to medical emergencies marking the first time the federally coordinated response system has been activated on a full nationwide basis. Thompson said the government was dispatching four disaster medical teams to New York City and three to Washington. Each 35-member team includes physicians, nurses and emergency health technicians, all trained in traumatic injuries, he said. In addition, officials sent four mortuary disaster teams to New York and three to Washington.

Noting that many people had donated blood, Thompson said, 300 treated before By Stevenson Swanson Tribune national correspondent NEW YORK As dusk turned into evening, dozens of emergency personnel in green scrubs and white lab coats lined the street outside St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center in Greenwich Village, gurneys and sheet-covered office chairs at the ready, anxiously awaiting more victims of the World Trade Center disaster. In the hours since a pair of hijacked passenger planes destroyed the twin towers of the trade center, St. Vincent's, the major trauma center closest to lower Manhattan, treated more than 300 people, many of them injured rescue workers. But by evening, the flow of ambulances had slowed to a trickle at St Vincent's and other area hospitals.

Hampered by falling debris and smoldering wreckage, rescue workers were impeded from further sifting the trade center's ruins for survivors Tuesday night. Hundreds, if not thousands of people, are feared still remaining in the rubble. On a typical day, 50,000 people worked in the twin towers. Of the people St. Vincent's MEDICAL RESPONSE Disaster By Marlene Cimons and Jonathan Peterson Special to the Tribune -WASHINGTON The people who work at the New York State Emergency Center in Albany report to work each day underground, in a bunker surrounded on all sides by four feet of reinforced concrete in preparation for a medical disaster.

On Tuesday, the disaster occurred. "Right now we're trying to locate any survivors, possibly trapped in the collapses," said Hans Hallman, a spokesman for the center, adding that all of its forces in New York City had been deployed emergency medical aid, transportation personnel, the National Guard, police, firefighters, "everyone." The nation's health-care sys- I them against a list of people known to have been admitted or treated and released from a hospital. The list was being updated constantly. Jeff Pesot was among those seeking information. He was concerned about friends and relatives who worked at Euro-brokers, a firm that occupied offices in one of the World Trade Center towers.

He had received an e-mail at 3 p.m. EDT from two of his friends at the company confirming they had survived, he said. But he continued to worry about a cousin and several other friends. Misha Phukhan, 26, came in search of her missing sister, Bella Phukhan, 24. The sisters both worked in the World Trade Center, but for different companies.

Misha was on her way to work when the first plane struck. Her sister worked in the 104th-floor offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial firm, in the first building hit. Misha said she had spoken to Bella earlier in the morning but had not heard from her since the disaster occurred. St. Vincent's was the third hospital Misha had visited in her so-far futile search for information about Bella.

"They just 'Right now we're trying to locate any Hans Hallman, New York State Emergency Center four helicopters were grounded under orders from the U.S. Park Police. About 20 doctors and nurses dressed in scrub uniforms milled around until the ban was lifted at 2:45 p.m. A helicopter returned with another burn victim at 4 p.m. "We're here to provide patient care but we only had 12 patients," said Mark Smith, chairman of emergency medicine.

"The reason we had so few is that they were unable to get out." drills are no match for The Rev. Roger Fawcett, a Roman Catholic priest at nearby St. Columba's parish, came immediately to the hospital when he heard of the catastrophe. "We saw a lot of banged-up people," he said. "The first reaction is incredulousness and unbelief." Fawcett said he saw many firefighters and other rescue workers being brought into the emergency room.

He added that a first-aid station had been set up at the base of the twin towers soon after the disaster, and many of the injured aid workers chaos of "We need Americans to continue to answer to that call." An additional 73 disaster medical teams from throughout the country stood ready to be deployed, along with 7,000 private sector medical and support personnel. Health and Human Services is working with other federal agencies and local health officials to assess specific needs in New York City and the nation's capital. Such disaster teams have previously been summoned in response to natural disasters, such as Tropical Storm Allison, which caused major flooding in Houston this year. Thompson also activated the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams, burn units and an emergency surgical team. One major hospital in New tem prepares for such disasters with exercises that pull together federal health-care officials, their state and Jocal counterparts, and medical providers throughout the country.

Arlington County, prepares for catastrophes at the Pentagon. Federal emergency plans cover everything from medical care to patient evacuation to mortuary care to treatment of injured animals. But in the-chaotic aftermath of Tuesday's terrorist attacks, such carefully laid plans collided with the complications of reality. As the Washington Hospital Center declared an emergency Code Orange, helicopters rushed seven Pentagon victims to the facility, which has the region's only adult burn center. But at 11 a.m.

EDT the center's 7.