We learn so many lessons from potential tragedy — glean from it so many cautionary tales, ponder enough what-ifs to make us shudder at the thought of one thing happening just a little bit differently or a touch later than it did in real life — that on nights like Wednesday, it is easy to be buckled by its weight.
Smoke filled the sky over much of Lackawanna County, and the scent of it wafted slightly farther. Underneath that smoke, the Midvalley glowed a bright orange. It didn’t take a fire marshal to determine a blaze was raging somewhere.
The fact that it hit just about as bad a place as possible had the entire region’s attention focused on a full hospital, with flames raging through the roof of a section of Lehigh Valley Hospital-Dickson City.
Seventy-seven patients and many doctors, nurses, technicians and other staffers, were in the building when the alarms started blaring. Those workers, including plenty who rushed to the scene to help even though they were off-duty, were instrumental in evacuating the patients — pushing them on wheelchairs, carrying them on stretchers, carefully helping them as they walked best they could into the dead of night and the February cold. Fire departments from throughout Lackawanna and Luzerne counties knocked down the flames within half an hour and stayed on hand to douse hot spots for the next few hours. State and local police and county buses rallied to the scene, and nearby businesses chipped in as staging areas.
Working together, they saved lives. Amazingly, given the severity of the fire and the challenging logistics involved in getting patients out of beds and into the street quickly, no injuries were reported.
“It is not short of a miracle that no one was injured and that the patients are safe,” state Rep. Bridget Kosierowski, D-114, Waverly Twp., said from the scene, shortly after midnight.
That says so much about those among us special enough to run toward danger and remain collected in those moments of calamity. We should take every opportunity we are afforded to praise them for their expertise and courage in our most desperate and urgent times.
It also says a lot about how badly our region, like any really, needs a robust and constantly growing hospital system not just to support our residents, but local health care in general.
It rates as coincidence that the fire hit LVH-Dickson City just days after the nonprofit Tenor Health Foundation officially completed its purchase of Commonwealth Health System and its hospitals in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. But as the flames raged Wednesday night, it was difficult not to consider the ramifications losing service for any length of time there due to an unforeseen disaster would have regionwide if CHS workers and the community didn’t rally around those hospitals in recent years and make that facility more attractive for a buyer.
In other words, imagine our area with any less hospitals than it has now.
Of course, we didn’t need the reminder of any of this. Especially the way we got it. But in the wake of the fire in Dickson City, if one hospital shuts down, it isn’t a matter of simply choosing another and expecting the quality of care we’d all like to have when our health fails.
No hospital can do what it does best without the presence of so many others doing what they do well. More hospitals mean more resources, more individual attention, focused on fewer patients. As it stands in the wake of the fire, many of those 77 patients who weren’t discharged had to be transplanted to facilities throughout the region, to Geisinger and CHS hospitals throughout Lackawanna and Luzerne County.
This undoubtedly added strain on resources to health care workers and facilities in the area already doing more good work for more patients, with fewer beds. But, they’ve done it readily, willingly.
Hospitals are businesses too, and they can compete with each other. They can fight to do the best business, because whether these facilities are for-profit or nonprofit, the money brought in does matter when it comes to offering competitive wages to the brightest employees, to promoting innovation and encouraging a better quality of life all around for those who live in our region now and may choose to live here in the future.
But at the end of the day, especially ones that end the way Wednesday did, there are always reminders that they, like all who work to build are communities, are in this fight together.