Forest fires | A race against time to evacuate patients

Evacuating a hundred patients in the space of a few hours: this is the challenge taken up by a small team of health professionals mobilized day and night by the forest fires. In a meticulous ballet, they coordinated the movements of the patients, most often by air. Foray into the heart of the crisis.

Friday, June 2. Sept-Iles

Some 10,000 residents are being ordered to leave their homes after a state of emergency was declared due to forest fires. Patients at the Sept-Îles hospital, on the North Shore, are no exception. About fifty of them must be moved urgently to a hospital center in Quebec or Montreal.

Paramedics rush into action. “We had to have several patients per ambulance, which is rather rare,” says the director of operations – Côte-Nord of the Paraxion ambulance company, Manuel Charest-Imbeault. Patients are transported to the airport where they are taken care of by the Quebec Aeromedical Evacuation Program (EVAQ).

At the same time, at the University of Montreal Hospital Center (CHUM), nurses are installed in front of screens, equipped with headphones. It is here, at the Optimization Center – Intensive Care Bed Occupancy (COOLSI), that the transfers of each patient are coordinated.

The nurses received at the end of the afternoon a list of all the patients to be evacuated. “Hospitals across the province told us how many patients they could take. From that, we decided who was going where,” explains Marie-Eve Desrosiers, director of the network coordination department at COOLSI.

But we must act quickly. “When we were arrested, a first cohort of patients were already on their way to Quebec,” says Caroline Riopel, COOLSI coordinator. On board planes, doctors and nurses are available to patients.

Evacuations continue throughout the evening and night.

Some patients even refuse to take the first flight to mainland France. “It is very worrying for them. Sept-Îles is far from Montreal,” explains Marie-Eve Desrosiers.

During the night, about thirty patients land at the Montreal airport. When they arrive, the Urgences-santé paramedics transport them to the hospitals in charge of collecting them, determined by the COOLSI team.

Friday, June 2. Lebel-sur-Quevillon

The same evening, the approximately 2,100 inhabitants of the municipality of Lebel-sur-Quévillon, located in Jamésie, must pack their bags. The fire caused by lightning forces the triggering of a mandatory evacuation alert.

The patients of the health center are evacuated by ambulance and by plane, indicates the director of operations for the company Dessercom in Abitibi, Christian Williams. Some of them are transferred to the Chibougamau health center.

The paramedics of Lebel-sur-Quévillon were themselves affected by the evacuation order and found refuge more than a hundred kilometers away, in the barracks of Senneterre.

Tuesday, June 6. Chibougamau

In the middle of the evening on Tuesday, it was the turn of Chibougamau, in Nord-du-Québec, to declare a state of emergency. Its 7500 inhabitants are ordered to leave the city. All the patients of the Chibougamau health center too.

“Patients were woken up in their beds and told that they were going to Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean and then taking the plane to Montreal,” says Caroline Riopel of COOLSI. A total of 70 patients are evacuated.

“From 7:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m., there was a lot of transport to the airport,” recalls the director of operations of Ambulance Chicoutimi SLN, Hugues Lavoie. To achieve this, paramedics from Lac-Saint-Jean and Quebec come as reinforcements.

Some patients are already on their second transfer.

At the end of the evening, the COOLSI begins the distribution of patients in the various Montreal hospitals. A task that will take several hours.

“It was a hard night,” notes with a smile Nathalie Fortin, deputy director of the network coordination department at COOLSI.

The return

The evacuation notice was lifted on June 6 for residents of Sept-Îles, while residents of Chibougamau were able to return to their homes on Monday, June 12. More than a hundred patients were thus able to be transferred again, this time to their respective regions.

However, the teams had to mobilize to get there. “In Chibougamau, they completely closed the hospital, so they threw away all the food. We had to make sure they were ready to receive patients again before planning their return, ”explains Caroline Riopel.

For their part, the residents of Lebel-sur-Quévillon should be able to return to the municipality on Sunday, after two weeks of evacuation.