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Tampa Bay emergency doctors braced Friday for injuries from Hurricane Charley - not just from the storm itself, but from the accidents spawned in its wake.
By Friday evening, no storm-related injuries had been reported in Pinellas or Hillsborough counties, and Tampa Bay had escaped the worst of the storm. But local doctors urged people to be cautious cleaning storm debris.
People who board up windows and evacuate families may throw caution to the wind once the storm is gone, doctors said. They wield chainsaws without knowing how, blunder into downed power lines, and clamber onto wet rooftops.
Some hospitals have seen a fourfold increase in emergency patients in the days after a major hurricane, said Dr. Charles Sand, disaster medical director at St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa.
"Today we don't expect to see too much, because hopefully people are staying inside," he said Friday afternoon. "A lot of it's worse afterward."
Too many people try to clean with too little experience, said Dr. Steven G. Epstein, trauma surgeon at Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg.
"We always get people who aren't used to chainsaws and go out and buy them" after a storm, he said. "Now is not the time to learn how to use one."
People also do more work than usual, often without water or air conditioning, and get heart problems or heat exhaustion, Sand said.
Others wind up in the emergency room because doctors' offices are closed and they can't get seen for more routine problems or get prescriptions refilled.
At Tampa General Hospital, located on low-lying Davis Islands, staffers had to move computers and medical records out of basement offices. By late Friday, they were starting to think about unpacking.
"It's going to take us several days just to get this hospital back in order," said hospital spokesman John Dunn. "But we're not going to complain about it one bit."
In St. Petersburg, St. Anthony's Hospital hosted 75 extra patients Friday. Most of them were evacuated from Palms of Pasadena Hospital, but some also came from nursing homes and hospice facilities.