USS Gunston Hall News Article

My friend, LTJG Kirsten Davis, is on the USS GUNSTON HALL and here is an article a newspaper printed about her ship and its mission. (The pictures were inserted for a visual effect...they were taken by LTJG Kirsten Davis.)

LTJG Kirsten Davis on the USS GUNSTON HALL

January 25, 2010
After The Quake, Local Ship Works To Mend Wounds
By Corinne Reilly

The Virginian-Pilot KILLICK, HAITI --

It looked something like the scene of a massive plane crash when the first sailors from the Gunston Hall came ashore at a Haitian coast guard station here seven days ago. That's the best way Navy Cmdr. Fred Wilhelm knows to describe it.

"It was just mayhem," said Wilhelm, the ship's commanding officer. "There were bodies everywhere, people crying, nurses literally writing on foreheads."

The Gunston Hall is one of about a dozen Navy, Coast Guard and Military Sea lift Command ships from Hampton Roads that are working in Haiti to deliver aid to victims of this month's catastrophic earthquake, and the bulk of the ship's efforts are taking place here, at the coast guard compound where the sailors first landed.

The crew of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Tahoma was the first help to arrive at the compound after the disaster. They began treating patients as best they could, and when word spread, the wounded came by the hundreds. The Gunston Hall, a Virginia Beach-based dock landing ship, arrived a few days later, on Jan. 18.

Fast forward a week, and there are still plenty of people crying. But the bodies at the compound have been cleared away, and, for the most part, so has the chaos.

In their place stands a beachfront field hospital. There's a patient intake desk staffed with Haitian volunteers, a six-bed triage clinic, an18-bed recovery ward and a makeshift operating room - all set up in the few buildings left standing at the coast guard compound. A soccer field next door is serving as a helicopter landing pad, where more than 100 patients a day are being flown to the Navy hospital ship Comfort, anchored just offshore.

"It took a few days to get going, but it's a smooth operation now," said Wilhelm, who lives in Chesapeake. "We've got a good system." Behind him, three Navy corpsmen and a Haitian civilian rushed past carrying a man on a stretcher whose head was wrapped in bandages. They set him down inside a dark green military tent labeled with a sheet of paper that read : AWAITING MEDIVAC.

On lawns and dirt walkways throughout the compound, other patients and relatives sat, waiting. Some, in casts and bandages, lay on the ground.

Since the Gunston Hall arrived, the field hospital has treated close to 1,000 people, Wilhelm estimated. It's now seeing about 150 a day.

The ship's medical officer, Lt. Megan Brelsford, said most are coming with broken bones, infected wounds and burns.

"Unfortunately we've lost some of them," she said. "But a lot of people have been saved here too. They were desperate for the help when we showed up."

That urgency remains. Outside the coast guard station's fenced-off complex, hundreds of people come each day and wait at its bright blue metal gate for their turn to get in.

"There's no way we could help all these people at once, so we had to put that system in place," Wilhelm said. "This wouldn't work otherwise."

Once they make it inside, patients provide basic information that's recorded at an intake desk staffed by Haitian volunteers who are paid by the Navy with food. Next they're evaluated at the hospital's triage clinic. From there, they are sent home, to the ward, to surgery or to helicopters headed for shipboard hospitals.

Workers said some patients have come for treatment for conditions and injuries unrelated to the earthquake. Doctors at the field hospital have delivered at least six babies in the past week.

Besides sailors and corpsmen from the Gunston Hall, the hospital is staffed by workers from the United Nations, the U.S. Army and Air Force,the Mexican military and the American and Haitian coast guards. The staff also includes about 70 Haitian civilians. Leaders from each group meet each night to discuss their progress.

Wilhelm said about a third of his ship's 450 crew members are spending their days at the hospital. Those who don't treat patients help by carrying supplies, doing laundry and keeping generators running. The rest of the crew works on board or at a U.N. compound next door, where the Navy is using U.N. patrol trucks to distribute food and water to the surrounding city.

The Gunston Hall had just left the Joint Expeditionary Base's Little Creek campus for a deployment in Africa when it was diverted to Haiti.

"They warned us ahead of time that it wouldn't be pretty, and it isn't," said Chief Petty Officer Michael Harris, who usually works in weapons electronics; instead, he's spent the past week carrying stretchers.

"We're all just kind of doing whatever's needed," he said. Inside the triage clinic behind him, a handful of medical workers crowded around a little girl with braided hair clasped in white barrettes. She was lying on an exam table, screaming, a cast covering most of her lower half.

All the tables around her were taken. The room was packed. A man in a U.S. Navy uniform came in and looked around. "Everyone who does not absolutely have to be in this room needs to get out," he yelled.

Inside the recovery ward across the compound, Adeline Stephane, 27, sat on a military cot rubbing her forehead. She'd just had surgery to repair a broken foot and was taking antibiotics for an infected wound.

She had to have the operation without anesthesia because the hospital's first anesthesiologist, part of a team of Mexican doctors, had only just arrived; she was given morphine instead and said it didn't hurt.

"I can already feel it healing," she said.

On a bed across from her, Nadal Celestine, 18, lay with an I V in his arm. His right foot was gone - crushed by rubble in the earthquake. A surgeon at a Haitian hospital in Jacmel had amputated it, he said, but the wound quickly became infected.

He traveled to the medical center here after hearing about it from a friend.

"I should have come here first," Celestine said. "Then maybe I would still have my foot."