Today's date is August 31st. It is about 3.10 in the afternoon, central time.

Currently in the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Gustav is gaining force and making a B-line for the coast of New Orleans.

This was almost three years after Hurricane Katrina devastated that city and wreaked chaos.

One of my close friends, Dr. Norman McSwain,

whose chief of trauma and professor of surgery at Tulane University

and chief of trauma at Charity Hospital,

was held down at Charity Hospital following the aftermath of Katrina and lived through a rather

amazing tale of a city in chaos and a county hospital trying to provide care way beyond their

capacity.

In the days that followed, Dr. McSweene and I were able to talk from telephone from Charity Hospital here to Nashville,

and we actually watched as a coordinated attempt to not only rescue the care providers at Charity Hospital,

but also several patients that were there following the hurricane.

What I'm going to do today is a little bit

unusual. I'm going to talk about mass casualty incidents. And I'm going to combine this on two

podcasts that I do. I do what's called ICU rounds or surgery ICU rounds, which is a podcast

directed at in-hospital, hospital care providers that are providing care to the critically injured

patient. It's listened to not only by doctors, nurses, restory therapists, but also pre-hospital providers and paramedics.

We're also going to cross-post this on the podcast, phtlspodcast.com, which is pre-hospital trauma life support,

which is an educational program designed for pre-hospital providers to extend the principles of advanced trauma life support to the pre-hospital arena.

It is a widely successful program.

I'm privileged to be one of the medical directors of that program and one of the editors, and there's over half a million providers in 40 countries.

I'm going to talk about preparation for mass casualties in this podcast, and in the

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