Kimball Farms administrators and staff, Russell Phillips & Associates, and local police, fire, and emergency medical services practiced the evacuation plan to iron out the details.

LENOX, Mass. — Should Kimball Farms need to evacuate its residents, administrators have plans to get them somewhere safe.

That is if they can find a pen to write down the phone number for the other facility.

A minor detail, but one of a number of critical minutiae that the assisted living community's leaders discovered was lacking from their emergency response plan during Thursday morning's drill.

 

The facility partnered with local law enforcement and consultants Russell Phillips & Associates to run through a mock situation.

 

"You can have a really great plan. It is can perfect. It can be polished with the I's dotted and T's crossed. And it sits on the shelf and looks great. But until you practice it to see where the weakest points are, you don't know if it really works for not," Andy McGuire, of Russell Phillips & Associates, said. 

 

The drill was based on a fire breaking out in the electrical room, which led to power being cut. A dozen residents with different health needs had to be evacuated to other facilities with appropriate staff and a ride to get there. In getting those residents to a safe place, Kimball Farms need to follow up on each patient to know where everybody is located.

 

"This is the time you want to meet instead of it being a real incident when you all get together and say 'how are we going to handle this?'" Police Officer William Colvin said. "I think that is the important thing about drilling and practicing. You don't want a live incident to be the first time you ever come together as a unified group."

 

The facilities plan is part of the Massachusetts Long Term Care Mutual Aid Plan (MassMAPS) program, whas has more than 400 nursing homes and assisted living facilities as members. Once an incident occurs, MassMAPs opens a coordination center to handle the needs of various homes. 

 

During Thursday's drill, the center handled the needs of Kimball Farms, Craneville of Dalton, and the Chapin Center in Springfield to provide places to go and ways to get there. The center calls all of the regional partners to find what they can provide for mutual aid.

 

"We want people to activate the mutual aid plan to prevent you from having to evacuate," McGuire said, telling a story of how one facility that needed generator fuel to prevent an evacuation connected with another with fuel to spare.

 

The long-term care faculties are allowed to "surge" to 10 percent of their license to help with mutual aid during emergencies. Of the dozen who were "evacuated" on Thursday — with various needs like a certified nursing assistant to travel with four who all had memory problems — four went to three different locations. And rides and staff were provided by those places.

 

The exercise even included a mock press conference and staging area for administrators to sort how how they would handle media requests for information.

 

"It fine-tunes the plan. You may have the global issues identified but then as you are going through the plan layer by layer, you are fine tuning it and perfecting it," Shepard said. 

 

What they found were needs like pens, labels to take note of the conference call number, an easels with a flip chart to sort tasks, and identification of vehicles so security knows who is allowed on the property or not, among the "small issues" Shepard said were identified. 

 

The exercise not only walked through the plan to find those issues, but it also gives Kimball Farms staff a chance to have a closer relationship with first responders. 

 

"This is 235 people. It is a small community within itself. It just sends a positive message to all of the people in this community," Deputy Fire Chief Chris O'Brien said. "It is a small community but it does happen and it happens more often than people like to think."

 

In recent years, Lenox has had to evacuate the high school on one occasion and residents from the Curtis Building during a fire. With so many residents at Kimball Farms, O'Brien said forming a relationship so that everybody is on the same page is important should something happen.

 

MassMAPS performed similar exercises all over the state this week. According to McGuire, the intent is to focus on communication, tracking evacuated residents, and handling influxes of new ones at receiving facilities. In the mock session, observers took additional notes to help find weak spots that could be strengthened to enhance each plan. 

 

The exercises are a joint effort by the MassMAP members, Russell Phillips & Associates, Massachusetts Senior Care Association, LeadingAge Massachusetts, Mass-ALFA, Massachusetts Department of Public Health Bureaus of Preparedness and Emergency Management & Facility Licensure and Certification, local fire departments, emergency medical services and emergency management officials.