CMC re-opens after noxious smell had sickened workers, forcing evacuation

After lab workers mysteriously got sick last Tuesday, forcing an emergency closure, Coulee Medical Center started a phased re-opening Friday morning, starting first with its emergency department at 7 a.m.

Tuesday afternoon Chief Executive Officer Ramona Hicks said CMC was back to full operations and that patients had been back in the building for four days with no problems.

Widely reported as a "gas leak," Hick said that was in error, noting that there is no natural gas in the hospital.

The decision to re-open was made mid Thursday afternoon after a meeting with state officials.

It had been 20 hours with people in the building following that shut-down and subsequent investigations looking for a possible cause of the noxious odor that caused half the hospital's laboratory team to get sick.

After spending five hours in hazmat gear Wednesday looking for anything that could be the cause, state Dept. of Ecology investigators found nothing, Hicks reported Thursday afternoon. DOE's personnel were the second set of investigators to try to detect a problem inside, protected by self-contained breathing apparatus, after responders from the Bureau of Reclamation tried soon after the evacuation.

Hicks said she and Penny Lewis, the manager of the lab, were first back in the building, unmasked to try to smell anything unusual. They couldn't, and suffered no ill effects, although an extraction team was standing by just in case.

After that, other lab workers and housekeeping staff were allowed in, with none affected.

"We're going to move forward cautiously," Hicks said Thursday afternoon.

That meant moving equipment back into the emergency department first and opening it by 7 a.m. Friday.

They followed that opening by bringing back long-term care (LTC) and acute-care patients who had been taken to other facilities, along with making the contacts and planning the logistics to make that happen.

Patients and long-term care residents had been sent to facilities in surrounding towns, including Columbia Basin Hospital in Ephrata, which took on all the LTC residents. "Our goal was to keep as many long-term care residents together as possible," Hicks said, adding a "a big shout-out" for CBH's cooperation.

An important factor in bringing back services was not overwhelming the available lab workers who are not sick, Hicks said, about half of them. The others were still not feeling well Thursday after their exposure to whatever had caused their headaches, chest pains, shortness of breath and vomiting two days earlier.