At 3 a.m. Thursday, the hospital's emergency room suddenly became a ... disaster classroom

The aftermath of the unthinkable -- an F3 tornado that demolished the Madison Street apartments in Du Quoin -- played out in the emergency room at the Marshall Browning Hospital starting at 3 a.m. Thursday.

The disaster drill was unannounced to the hospital's unsuspecting overnight emergency room staff, and tested -- among other things -- the hospital's "call-in" protocol. Salaried staff are expected to come in when their cell phones and pagers go off.

Emergency medicine director Karen Williams and others were already at the West Main Street base of operations for the Pinckneyville Ambulance Service. There, Du Quoin and SIU student volunteers were receiving injury makeup and instructions on what to tell -- and not to tell -- ER personnel when the private vehicles and ambulances carrying the victims arrived at the hospital. They included SIU athlete Rishonda Napier who at the age of eight actually appeared in an episode of the television hit series E.R.

At the outset, hospital personnel were caught off-guard by the size and scope of the drill. There was a little awkwardness as medical personnel accustomed to treating car accident and heart patients gathered their thoughts on how to deal with this scale of trauma. It became a teaching exercise and the ER became one large classroom.

Staff members were confronted with the simplest tasks of finding trauma "smart tags" for victims to deciding who to call to take care of an infant whose mother died in the tornado.

There were a couple of miscues but supervisors spent much of the morning simply helping staff remember what they already know.

But, there was also great organization, calm and high quality decisions. Within minutes, hospital staffers were pulling onto the parking lot and taking their places in the high stakes drama. Longtime ER nurse Sandra Gant stepped in wonderfully. RN Hillary Dinkins has only been in the ER for a few days and quickly mastered the work ahead of her. Hospital facilities supervisor Lyle VanZandt confirmed all systems were operational. You could hear the verbal exchanges over the radios from staff members in all departments who did their jobs well. The drill did what it was suppose to do: make use of a a broad skill set under extreme stress.