Preparing for the Worst

Disaster Drills Help Protect the Community

Members of the Butte County Sheriff’s Office SWAT Team and Enloe Health’s Security department participated in a disaster drill at the Enloe Health Gonzales Comprehensive Cancer Center.

How will Enloe Health caregivers react to a mass casualty event such as a chemical spill or airplane crash? How will they provide care and continue to help patients?

With hospitals being places of healing, considering these questions may seem unthinkable. But today, they are questions Enloe leaders keep top of mind. The good news is that with proper and orderly reaction, caregivers can save lives, stay safe and maintain public confidence. Practice makes it possible — and Enloe caregivers practice a lot.

They regularly prepare for a variety of incidents that may occur. In fact, The Joint Commission — an organization that inspects and approves health facilities in the U.S. — requires Enloe to conduct two emergency-preparedness exercises a year to test Enloe’s Emergency Operations Plan. Actual emergency events can substitute for one of the required exercises, said Kim Freedle, Enloe Health’s Director of Emergency Services.

“We have plenty of actual activations, but running exercises routinely allows us to make sure our plans are up to date, and more importantly, we can educate staff, so they know how to react if something happens,” she said. “Our drills come in all shapes and sizes.”

One recent drill took place at the new Enloe Health Gonzales Comprehensive Cancer Center. Five members of Enloe Health’s Security department combined with the Butte County Sheriff’s Office SWAT Team for training and coordination.

The 10-hour session helped identify potential security vulnerabilities while boosting cooperation between the agencies, Freedle said.

One scenario involved an armed man taking a hostage on the building’s third floor. A helicopter transported SWAT members from the parking lot to the center’s roof. Inside, they ordered the man — played by an actor — to release his hostage. He refused, and the SWAT team responded.

Freedle said there’s practically no limit to drill theme possibilities.

“Sometimes we test pieces of our emergency response. For instance, we may send out Enloe Alerts — Enloe’s communication system using phone calls, emails, and texts — and we talk through an activation process,” she said. “Sometimes we test specific teams, such as Security, and their ability to identify a threat, activate our response and make appropriate notifications, or we’ll run a full-scale exercise to simulate a real-world event — such as a surge event like we did in September 2025.”

That exercise demonstrated how an overwhelming number of incoming patients would affect Enloe’s Emergency Department and other departments. Caregivers had to decide how to treat patients who were played by actors. Some actors played patients who were severely injured and near death, some played patients who could be saved with treatment or surgery, and some played patients who had minor injuries. The exercise made Enloe caregivers step outside their comfort zone and act out how they would respond.

In addition to having regular drills, Enloe Health also sends caregivers to the Federal Emergency Management Administration Center for Domestic Preparedness in Alabama. There, caregivers train under pressure in a mock hospital with patient simulators, realistic emergency rooms and disaster actors. Then they return to Enloe with knowledge of how to react if the unthinkable happens, and they share that knowledge with their teams.

“It’s a valuable experience that is difficult to replicate anywhere else,” Freedle said. “We will continue sending caregivers to FEMA trainings as often as we can and continue our drills. We want to keep preparing for the worst, so we’re best prepared to protect our community.”