Livengood John

On March 7th and 8th of 2007 authorities from federal, state, county, and municipal jurisdictions/agencies having mass migration response responsibilities (as per the Department of Homeland Security Operation Vigilant Sentry, as well as State and Local plans) initiated the last of a series of mass migration exercise events. The mission of the exercise was to “unify” a federal, state, and local response to effectively mitigate a catastrophic mass migration incident, similar to the Mariel Boatlift (125,000+ migrants) in 1980. The exercise included volunteers who visited a few local emergency departments with specific scripts describing an acute medical condition.

Objective

Describe the use of the ESSENCE (Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics) system to detect unusual patterns of emergency department use during a full scale mass migration exercise in South Florida.

On October 24, 2005, Hurricane Wilma made landfall on the southwest coast of Florida as a category 3 storm. The storm moved toward the northeast and passed through Palm Beach and Broward Counties before entering the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricane force winds and rain caused extensive damage to electrical infrastructure and traffic lights, and temporarily displaced thousands of residents. Power outages in Broward County affected over 90% of its 1.8 million residents, with some outages lasting >2 weeks. Boil water notices were declared for much of the county. Acute care hospitals remained open during this time, although services provided by health care providers in other settings were interrupted due to structural damage and power outages.

Objective

We used the syndromic surveillance system ESSENCE to describe the morbidity after Hurricane Wilma in Broward County, Florida.