With a blanket of snow outside and the calm comings and goings of hospital staff, Centura Avista Adventist Hospital could not look or feel more different than it did a year ago to the day.
The marks of the Marshall fire were still visible around the Louisville hospital on Friday, where a year ago nearly everything around it burned to the ground.
Avista CEO Isaac Sendros recalled the evacuation as the Marshall fire, spurred on by 100 mph winds, jumped across an eight lane highway and began racing across a field to the hospital. Ventilated COVID-19 patients and newborns in the neonatal intensive care unit were some of the patients who had to be carefully and quickly removed from the fire’s path — the entire hospital was evacuated in less than two hours.
Evacuations moved not only from the top to bottom of the hospital, but also away from the side of the hospital where the liquid oxygen tanks were stored outside. Teams went outside with hoses, spraying down the area around the tanks to prevent them from catching fire and likely exploding.
“I was the last one to leave and I took a picture, saying that I don’t think we’ll see it here in the morning,” Sendros said. “I couldn’t sleep that night; I woke up at 3 a.m., just watching the news. There was a reporter in the neighborhood in the back — somehow they made it into the neighborhood — and they’re doing a live feed at 5 a.m. and all I could see was the emergency sign. I still get chills talking about it. I’m like, we made it. We’re there.”
After an extensive cleaning, the hospital was able to fully reopen in just three weeks. Sendros said it was important to Avista to reopen as quickly as possible, both because of the COVID-19 surge at the time but also because they wanted to be a beacon of hope for the devastated community.
“I consider us being here nothing short of a miracle,” Sendros said. “When you look at the fire on a map, it literally surrounded every inch of this place and made it within feet of the hospital and the liquid oxygen tanks — that would have been a pretty rough scenario. The fact that we’re here, we consider it divine intervention, and it’s important for us to continue to help this community heal.”
Over the past year, Sendros has watched from his office windows as the homes that weren’t so lucky have been cleaned up and see many now in the first phases of rebuilding. About 30 people associated with the hospital lost their homes in the fire, while many others have spent the year processing that day.
“What’s hard for me is, you saw the devastation,” he said. “Those are people we know and we’ve cared for and many of the people who live there work for us. It’s hard to articulate their devastation.”
Avista has been offering numerous resources to staff since the fire, including counseling and support, classes about resiliency and lots of training from an incident command standpoint to help everyone feel confident should a similar situation ever arise.
“From what the teams are telling us, it’s been a hard year,” Sendros said. “They have worked through it, and they’re ready to start moving into what the future has in store.”
In the year since, Sendros said the hospital has seen its connections with the community, including relationships with the faith-based community, strengthen further. Avista hosted a healing walk in Louisville a few weeks ago as the one year anniversary approached.
He hopes to see those community connections, which have been key to the hospital since it opened, only continue to grow.
“This community has been phenomenal,” Sendros said. “They have restored my hope, seeing how they have rallied around each other during the fire in the days and months afterwards.”
