Nurse Felicia Daley says the first sign of trouble early Tuesday morning was when the power went out.
Daley was at the end of her shift and helping a patient in the cardiac area on Brockton Hospital's second floor a little after 6:30 a.m. when things went dark. Then the fire alarm went off.
"You kind of realized it probably wasn't a drill when the power goes out," she said. "But the fire alarm's going off, and now I can smell smoke."
An electrical transformer fire grew into a 10-alarm emergency Tuesday, leaving the hospital's staff and firefighters with the daunting task of evacuating all 160 patients in the building. And they did it — without any injuries or deaths.
First responders came from miles around, stretching from Brookline to Fall River, to help with the effort.
"This went as smooth as it possibly could working with the Brockton Hospital staff and our own membership, the Brockton Fire Department, our community partners and mutual aid partners," Brockton Fire Chief Brian F. Nardelli said during a press conference Tuesday.
City officials and hospital CEO Robert Haffey both praised firefighters and hospital staff for working together to handle the challenge.
"I do want to also compliment and stress how brave the nursing staff and other staff in the hospital were. They did an incredible job," Haffey said Tuesday. "I was up on the floors with them as we were moving patients. Just an incredible sight to see the teamwork that occurred today."
Daley said patients also handled the crisis calmly.
"There was a moment where I just stood there and I just thought to myself, 'Oh my God, this is going so smoothly. Like, I cannot believe how smoothly this is going, given what it is,'" she recalled.
Once those alarms went off, Daley said, all of the double doors along the hospital's hallways and patient doors slammed shut.
"At that point, I went through one of the smoke doors to our main nurses station, and that's when it was really clear that not only was there smoke, but it was close. It was close to this floor," she said.
The team started moving patients out of the second-floor rooms that were getting smoky and through several more of the fire doors to an area further from the fire.
"And then the firefighters come in and they tell us that the air quality is no longer OK for us to breathe, and that we all need to go out," she said.
But they hadn't gotten all the patients out of that area yet.
"And we have that moment where your heart is just, 'Can I do that? Can I leave my patients?' You know, the firefighters are telling you something and you have to listen to them," Daley remembered. "Everyone was just like, 'OK, we're going to leave, but we're going to go grab one more patient before we go.' And trusting that, you know, the last 10 patients on the second floor were going to get out by the firefighters."
Sure enough, the firefighters wheeled the remaining patients out of the smoky area. At that point, Daley said the hospital's CEO was there, helping hold the doors open as firefighters evacuated patients.
"I made the decision early on to split the building in half," Fire Chief Nardelli said during the Tuesday press conference, explaining how firefighting efforts were kept separate from the evacuation process. "All the fire stuff was happening in the background to make sure everyone was separated to make sure we didn't create any more hazard to the patients."
In Daley's role she's not tied to a particular floor or unit, so once those patients were out, she moved to the third floor to help move medical/surgical patients there. By the time she got to the maternity unit on the fourth floor, "mom-baby couplets" were being moved out to a safer area of the hospital. Firefighters carried one woman out of the building who was in active labor, Daley said.
Because of the loss of power, the phones were out and there were no overhead speakers for making announcements. Staff used cellphones to communicate with a central command, which raised concerns about urgent needs and kept track of where each patient was.
The lack of power also meant that patients who required oxygen could no longer get it from the hospital's central line, and needed to be switched to portable oxygen tanks.
"And those only last you so long," Daley said.
In the critical care unit, Daley said, staff kept track of the available oxygen by laying empty oxygen tanks on their side, while those that still could be used were upright.
The power outage also cut off access to stored drugs, Daley said, meaning doctors were at risk of running out of medication for patients who were under sedation.
"So the nurses were able to come out to the doctor and be like, 'Hey, listen, this drip is off. This patient's going to start waking up. What can we do?'" Daley said.
The central command team was able to round up enough medication for those patients, she said.
"They were able to ensure that our patients were kept comfortable and safe until the firefighters could get them out," Daley said.
After patients were moved out the smokiest areas, firefighters began evacuating all the patients from the building, without the benefit of elevators. Firefighters carried patients down five floors, in some cases, on chairs or boards.
"If a patient can walk down the stairs, if they could scoot down on their bottom, that was all kind of part of the evacuation, was just: however you can get them down," Daley said.
Ultimately, more than 70 ambulances transported all 160 patients to other Massachusetts hospitals.
One stroke of luck was the timing of the fire, Daley said. It happened at an hour when the night shift and day shifts were overlapping, resulting in more staff available to help out.
"Honestly, it's a miracle that it happened at the time it did, because I think it would have been a very different story had it been at 4 a.m. and not at almost 7," Daley said.
The day after the fire, it's not clear how long before the hospital will be able to reopen. In addition to those who rely on the hospital for medical care, Daley said there are a lot of open questions for staff.
Daley said she's confident hospital administrators are working hard to figure out how long the hospital will need to be closed, and what that will mean for staff like her.
"Three weeks is very different than three months for people financially," she said.
Haffey said on Tuesday they're still assessing damage to the hospital in order to determine when it can reopen. In the meantime, the hospital will continue to offer outpatient services at other facilities. A spokesperson for Signature Healthcare, which owns the hospital, did not return a request for comment Wednesday.
In the end, Daley said, it's incredible that no one was injured in the fire and evacuation.
"It just showed a great, just collaborative team effort," Daley said. "Everyone was on their A-game, for sure."
