Chippewa Falls (WQOW) - Most of the patients involved in Saturday's fatal crash were taken to St. Joseph's Hospital Saturday night in Chippewa Falls.
"The patients became unstable and they ended up having to stop here," says Sue Johnson, who serves as the St. Joseph's Hospital Director of Emergency and Urgent Care Services.
That crash happened Saturday night in Chippewa County. The sheriff's department says an SUV ran a stop sign and collided with a truck at the intersection of Highway 124 and County Highway B. Two people died, 67-year-old Karen Larson and 55-year-old Lori Barger. Both women were riding in the SUV. Eight others were hospitalized. Law enforcement believes five are still in the hospital, including Elizabeth Kopp, who's in critical condition.
Six patients were taken to St. Joseph's on Saturday night. The hospital says it had to call in five extra doctors and 25 other workers. "Almost all the people that were called in were here before the first patient arrived," Johnson remembers.
Dr. Erik Dickson was one of those doctors who received the call. He is also on staff at Marshfield Clinic in Cornell. Dr. Dickson says improvements made to the Chippewa Falls hospital helped his team treat the patients. (An ER renovation and expansion project was completed two years ago.) "We needed every single room that we had. We needed the rooms to be large," says Dickson. "We needed radiology and CT scan availability and our previous emergency room was about the size of one hallway in this emergency room... so this has helped immensely."
"I think if we would have looked at this five or six years ago, it would have been a very, very difficult situation... somewhat chaotic," Johnson says. "What we do now is we do a lot of mock trauma drills. We do mass casualty drills and because of that, we have just continually improved our ability to provide that service to any patient that walks through the door."
"One of the worst parts of this accident was that all of the patients were very critically injured. In this day and age with airbags and seatbelts and all the safety mechanisms that vehicles have, you just don't see that many injuries in one accident; especially with two vehicles," Dr. Dickson points out. "We never want to see this again, but if something like this happens again, we are going to be prepared."
The driver of the SUV, Gerald Larson from Eau Claire, was arrested for OWI following the crash. He has not been charged.
