{"id":33403,"date":"2023-08-03T15:56:08","date_gmt":"2023-08-03T19:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=33403"},"modified":"2023-08-03T17:45:44","modified_gmt":"2023-08-03T21:45:44","slug":"southlake-garage-fire-had-ripple-effect-for-emergency-response-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/southlake-garage-fire-had-ripple-effect-for-emergency-response-team\/","title":{"rendered":"Southlake garage fire had ripple effect for emergency response team"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Southlake Regional Health Centre is still assessing the damage stemming from an alleged arson in their parking garage on July 20 which resulted in a 28-year-old Vaughan man charged with arson and two counts of assault on a police officer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, thanks to a quick response from the Southlake team, the cascading impacts resulting from the fire kept the impact on patients and operations to a minimum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs a 24\/7, 365 critical facility, we obviously have an emergency management system that allows us to respond to various incidents that might pose a threat to our business operations and I think what was unique [about July 20] was the requirement to respond to multiple simultaneous incidents,\u201d says John Marshman, Vice President of Capital Facilities and Business Development for Southlake Regional Health Centre. \u201cI think\u2026the training we put in place and the systems we put in place were really what we relied upon to get ourselves through it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team was notified of the incident at 9.45 p.m.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Central York Fire Services and York Regional Police responded to the fire in the parking garage, Southlake\u2019s emergency personnel and others were focused on addressing issues within the building related to the incident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe immediately implemented a Code Grey Air Exclusion, effectively a procedure to lock down outside air going into the building to prevent any entrainment from that air and those contaminants from getting into our patient spaces and causing issues that way,\u201d says Marshman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While this was underway, they were also notified of a flood in their systems on the sixth floor as a pressure relief valve gave way and unleashed a \u201csubstantive\u201d amount of water that infiltrated the five floors beneath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This flooding, in turn, hit a telecom room, taking down the phone system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have a fire that is being responded to in our parking garage, and [that\u2019s] obviously unavailable and a key resource for patients and staff to access the site,\u201d says Marshman. \u201cWe have a flood, which requires response to each of six different areas to mitigate the source, to assess and contain any water that has infiltrated into those other spaces. With our phone system\u2026having to respond now to re-mapping our entire communications protocols\u2026and establish downtime procedures\u2026to ensure that not only can we communicate internally between those key functions and also to communicate it to the outside world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gayle Seddon, Director of Southlake\u2019s Ontario Community Health Team, likened both healthcare and the response to what Southlake\u2019s Derek Rowland described as \u201cthe perfect storm\u201d of issues as a \u201cteam sport\u201d where everyone needs to communicate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The phone system, she says, was critical to operations, keeping doctors in the loop on patients, communicating test results, and ensuring families can connect with our loved ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur coms team sent out a lot of information on social to tell people our phones were down so families and staff didn\u2019t get worried,\u201d she says. \u201cAnother important thing is with our partner organizations, if you have a heart attack in your home, you need to get to Southlake\u2019s cardiac team as quickly as possible and there is a phone call to make that happen. We quickly flipped to our downtime procedures \u2013 all our partners in the EMS knew what that number was. Should anyone be unfortunate enough in the community to have a heart attack, we were perfectly ready to provide the care they need.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Helping to steady the ship was Johnny Grajcar, the hospital\u2019s Director for Support Services, who jumped in as the security lead. Assembling the team in 45 minutes, there were two key tasks at the outset: assessing the current situation and \u201cfiguring out how to mobilize the various areas\u201d \u2013 and some of the learnings from the pandemic helped, he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was having the virtual teams to speed up the process and not have any delays,\u201d he says. \u201cWe had our calls both clinical and on the facilities side join in. From that point, we were able to establish what are the critical pieces we needed to do right now to ensure safety for our staff, but primarily for our patients.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a winning formula to what is hoped to be a one-off event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team is proud that the Southlake Emergency department remained open throughout and the hospital was never on re-direct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWithin 45 minutes, we were assembled on site and able to leverage the structure to direct what was obviously a multi-faceted response, including the appropriate security and facilities personnel to manage the interface with Fire Services; the entire team of environmental service workers to respond to six different locations along with facilities operations personnel to make sure the water was contained, to make sure we were able to establish or solve the problem at the source, and ensure any issues with our clinical operations were clearly understood so the team could put together their response,\u201d says Marshman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Southlake Regional Health Centre is still assessing the damage stemming from an alleged arson in their parking garage on July 20 which resulted in a 28-year-old Vaughan man charged with arson and two counts of assault on a police officer. But, thanks to a quick response from the Southlake team, the cascading impacts resulting from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":33389,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/2003-08-03-02.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-8GL","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-24 14:19:37","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}