Doctors, volunteers recount Sanglah’s ‘panic room’

The Jakarta Post, Denpasar Fri, October 12 2012,



It was a nightmarish time for I Nengah Kuning Atmadja, a surgeon at Sanglah Hospital, who on that Saturday evening of Oct. 12, 2002 was on night duty with a small number of staff in the hospital’s emergency room.

“The silence of the cold October night was suddenly broken when we saw ambulances keep coming and going to drop off the bodies and the injured at the hospital’s emergency ward, and the hospital turned into a ‘panic room’,” Atmadja recalled.

With limited equipment, a shortage of medicines, and, more importantly, only a small team of six doctors and nurses, they treated more than 300 wounded people; many of whom were severely burned.

“The hospital also received 180 bodies that night and we hardly had room to place them properly in our small morgue,” he remembered.

In just a few hours, local residents, the expatriate community and families of the victims rushed to Sanglah to check if any of their loved ones were among the victims.

Lanang Made Rudhiartha, the-then director of Sanglah Hospital, said at that time those were the best services the hospital could offer to treat the injured.

“That was the first time Sanglah Hospital received such a large number of patients in such a profound emergency,” Lanang said, adding that the huge scale of the tragedy opened the eyes of healthcare providers and the local government to the fact that Bali was not ready for such a large-scale disaster.

Sanglah Hospital was a poorly equipped general hospital located in the center of Denpasar. The hospital had only 10 small operating rooms, no special burns unit and a crowded emergency room.

“That night, we worked very fast and efficiently to categorize patients according to their condition. We placed black flags for the dead, red flags for the seriously injured and yellow flags for patients who were not too seriously wounded,” Atmadja said.

The team of doctors later contacted their colleagues from hospitals in Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung and even from Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan and Australia. Dozens of foreign doctors also joined the medical team.

I Wayan Suardana was a student at Udayana University’s Technical School when he worked together with 50 other students, residents and even businessmen, as volunteers at Sanglah.

“There were so many individuals, companies, local and international organizations that were eager to donate various necessities — food, beverages, cash, mattresses, blankets, body bags, medicines, but no one organized the donations, so students took the initiative to do so,” Suardana said.

The volunteers helped doctors, nurses, morgue staff, families and victims of the tragedy.

“The team of volunteers also worked with staff in the morgue to put dry ice in the hundreds of body bags every two hours. At first, we felt so scared, especially during the night, when there were fewer volunteers,” Suardana said.

I Ketut Suarjaya, head of Bali Health office, admitted that the 2002 tragedy had served as momentum for the island of Bali to improve its readiness and disaster management systems.