Practice pays off in response to raging nursing home fire
WEST CHESTER » The successful effort to simultaneously battle the five-alarm inferno at the Barclay Friends Home and move dozens and dozens of residents and staff from the senior living facility was the culmination of hours and days of emergency training, those involved said Friday in the aftermath of the dramatic blaze.
“This is once in a lifetime,” said a member of the Good Fellowship Ambulance Company, where many of the 200 or so evacuated were brought to safety in the early morning hours as the senior home burned. “This is the one that you prepare for.”
According to Bobby Kagel, director of the Chester County Department of Emergency Services, which helped coordinated the multi-agency response to the blaze, more than 200 firefighters, ambulance personnel, municipal police, fire police, county sheriffs, and state and federal fire investigators were called to the scene on North Franklin Street beginning at 10:30 p.m. Thursday.
But it was the months of training beforehand that those included had been involved in that kept the fire from being more of a tragedy than it certainly is, Kagel said.
“There are a lot of exercises, and lots of training, that goes into an operation like this,” Kagel said in a telephone interview on Friday as the emergency response continued, about nine hours after the flames were contained. “Just a lot of practicing of, ’What ifs.’ “
“Every emergency has its own unique set of challenges,” Kagel said, noting the fire’s fury, the danger to residents and staff, and the proximity to a residential neighborhood. “This one was no different. But it is why we plan and why we train for all different scenarios. Practicing now pays dividends.”
West Chester Police Chief Scott Bohn, who was called to the scene just after 1 a.m. and was still there as the sun rose over the nearby West Chester Golf and Country Club, agreed.
“You had people on the scene who were evaluating all the contingencies, about life priority being the first and foremost,” he said inside borough hall, where his officers were setting up a central control post in the fire’s aftermath to handle communications. “And they did a really fantastic job. They moved a large number of people in a short period of time” to a triage location at Good Fellowship’s station and subsequently to as many as three area hospitals.
“It is absolutely critical that we engage in these exercises, where we can see all the moving parts,” Bohn said. “The coordinated emergency efforts are the reward of all of our training” among first responders. “I’m always pleased at the level of coordination and cooperation that we have. Everybody did a really great job.”
One of those who stood at the edge of the fire scene Friday as the smoke still rose over the shells of buildings at the Barclay was U.S. Rep. Ryan Costello, R-6, of West Goshen, who lives nearby and came with his young son to observe. A former county commissioner, Costello said he was familiar with what goes into the first responders’ efforts.
“The magnitude of the fire was so immense that it was bound to test your local fire, ambulance and emergency response teams in every way,” he said later. “What these men and women showed is that they went above and beyond the call of duty, responding to and managing the removal and transportation of 100plus senior citizens, many of whom have very challenging physical conditions in an environment that makes it very, very difficult to do their job.
“We are lucky as residents of the West Chester area to have these men and women respond as they did,” he said.
One of the sites to which the evacuated residents were brought to begin placement in the fire’s wake was West Chester University. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Red Cross had set up an emergency shelter in Ehinger Gymnasium on the campus along South Church Street. Watching the progress of ambulances coming and going from the site was Nancy Santos Gainer, the university’s executive director of communications.
She said that the school’s chief of police, Jon Brill, doubles as the borough’s emergency management coordinator, and was in position to coordinate efforts between the school and the borough to handle the evacuees. Buses from the Krapf Bus Co. and other providers ferried residents from the fire scene to the university in the middle of the night, Gainer said, with 40 people eventually being cared for at the gymnasium until proper housing at area senior facilities could be found.
“It was a well-coordinated effort,” she said as students walked past. “Everyone was prepared for this. This is why we do all those exercises. We work as a team.”
“It is important to know that all of our university officers responded without hesitation to the needs of our community and helped evacuate those seniors at Barclay who could not escape the fire on their own,” said WCU President Christopher Fiorentino in a message to the university community. “Our team of officers also rose to the occasion by carrying and setting-up equipment for the Red Cross in Ehinger, and wheeled patients into Ehinger Gym and onto ambulances and buses.”