Spine boards

Spine boards are rigid boards used in the book as part of a labor-intensive patient evacuation at Memorial Medical Center. When ordinary movement through the hospital was no longer sufficient, staff and volunteers placed patients on the boards and carried them down the stairs, turning the boards into a practical link between the upper floors and the lower level.

Use During the Evacuation

Workers rolled patients onto their sides, positioned the spine boards beneath them, and then rolled them back onto the boards. They slid each board onto a waiting stretcher and wheeled it along the corridors to the staircase near the elevator bank. At the stairs, they lifted the boards off the stretchers and continued by hand.

The boards made it possible to move a patient through a narrow stairwell where a stretcher could not be carried in the same way. At each landing, the group raised the patient above the handrails and rotated the board to line it up with the next flight. The route descended five stories to the second-floor lobby and continued through a hallway toward the hospital’s power plant.

Coordinated Manual Transfer

The transfer depended on several people working together around each board. Thao Lam held the front end and used a flashlight to light the way; Karen Wynn carried the back end while managing her own flashlight. Two or three other volunteers stood beside them. Their task was not simply to bear the patient’s weight: as they negotiated each turn, someone continued pumping oxygen into the patient’s lungs and tried to keep the breathing tube in place.

The account emphasizes the repeated adjustments required by the staircase: lift, turn, and reposition the board at each landing, then continue downward. The boards provided a stable surface for this difficult passage, but the evacuation still relied on the coordinated effort of the people carrying and attending to the patient.

Role in the Hospital’s Crisis

The descent ended at the power plant, where the generators had fallen silent. In that setting, the spine boards are part of a chain of improvised movement through a hospital whose usual systems had failed: stretchers brought patients to the stairs, boards carried them down, and volunteers supplied light and hands-on assistance along the way.

The boards’ significance is practical rather than symbolic. Their appearance marks the physical work required to evacuate patients when access, power, and routine movement through the building were compromised. The passage makes clear that a piece of equipment could enable the transfer, but could not replace the people who had to carry it, turn it through the stairwell, and sustain the patient’s breathing during the journey.