Surviving a disaster: nurses recall Moore's fierce tornado.

1 Surviving a disaster: Nurses recall Moore’s fierce tornado It had been a busy morning in the OR at Moore Medical Center in Moore, Oklahoma, on May 20. By 3 pm, the surgery patients had left the postanesthesia care unit (PACU) and gone home. PACU nurses Debra Breshears, RN, and Barbra Barrow, RN, were getting ready to leave when they heard an alert that a tornado was in Newcastle, some 12 miles away. “We could see on the television how big the tornado was and that the hospital was directly in its path,” Breshears told OR Manager. Breshears called the nurses on the second floor medical-surgical (med-surg) unit to see if they needed additional stretchers or wheelchairs to move patients to a safe area in the emergency department (ED) on the first floor. The nurses said they had enough. As Breshears and Barrow arrived at the safe area, the med-surg nurses were bringing in the last of the patients. “What we didn’t realize until then was that between 250 and 300 people from the community were coming into the hospital for shelter,” says Breshears. They were being directed to the cafeteria.