Cleanup is now underway at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Dickson City after flames tore through one of its buildings Wednesday night.

DICKSON CITY, Pa. — Wednesday night in Dickson City, the very thing first responders train for but hope to never see.

“This is probably one of those once-in-a-lifetime, hopefully once-in-a-lifetime, emergencies that you experience. When we got the call last night, it was kind of like, eye-opening,” said Tom Taylor, Lackawanna County EMA Director.

That call was for a massive fire at Lehigh Valley Hospital on Main Street in Dickson City. First responders from across northeastern and central Pennsylvania, even as far away as the Lehigh Valley, showed up to help.

Lackawanna County EMA Director Tom Taylor was moved by the response. “I mean, I turned around at one point and saw 30 or 40 state troopers who just came there to help evacuate the building. The entire Mid Valley fire departments, I mean, I couldn’t say anything more. They basically stopped the fire from getting into the main hospital.”

While firefighters tackled the flames, making sure they stayed in the hospital’s Orthopedic Institute, police and EMTs worked on evacuating the main hospital.

Many of those same first responders were back at work the following morning on only a few hours’ sleep. Including Bruce Beauvais from Pennsylvania Ambulance. He was tracking down the company’s equipment that scattered as officials worked to safely remove patients during the fire. 

“Even though the hospital does have evacuation procedures in place, when you have that many patients and you have smoke condition and you have patients that are bed-bound, we wind up having to resort to our old faithful, the things that we use every day in our arsenal just to take people out of their homes. So, we wound up using stair chairs, reeves stretchers, which are classic devices that we’ve been using in EMS for decades, and then getting them down to a hospital bed or a stretcher down here,” said Beauvais.

From there, 77 patients were taken to close to a dozen different hospitals around the area.

“We went out, probably, a good 45 minutes outside our normal catchment zone for patients, but that’s what we needed to do. Obviously, we can’t inundate our local hospitals because now they’ve already lost a local resource,” said Beauvais.

Beauvais says all the patients were outside within an hour, and everyone was safely in another hospital within four hours. No one was injured, and the main hospital sustained only smoke and water damage.

The very thing first responders train for, and now they know they can handle it. 

“That was the big takeaway from this, we know that when it does happen, people do respond, and people respond very well here in Northeastern Pennsylvania,” added Beauvais.