Dr. George Rogan had never quite seen anything like it before and certainly hasn’t seen anything like it since.
Only four doctors were working when Royal Victoria Hospital was alerted that something terrible had happened.
But it was 1985. There were no cellphones, no instant alerts. And the pagers had gone mute.
Soon, what seemed like a never-ending parade of ambulances and cars bringing patients started arriving.
Rogan came to Barrie in 1982 to find no pediatric care or neonatal department at the local hospital, meaning families often had to seek medical help for children in Toronto.
With the city’s only other pediatrician, Dr. Trevor Hunt, Rogan developed the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and the two built an incubator. They also worked on alternative weekends at RVH, which was then situated on Ross Street.
Following the recent tornado in south-end Barrie on July 15, the now-retired Barrie doctor has been thinking again about how the local medical community was called upon to help so many people at once at the downtown hospital on the afternoon of Friday, May 31, 1985. On that spring day in 1985, an F4 tornado swept through central Ontario, claiming 12 lives and leaving many more injured.
This past summer's tornado was an EF2. It damaged numerous homes in southeast Barrie and injured 10 people.
Theatre by the Bay is also focusing on the 1985 tornado in its Green Skies project, which tells the fictional story of a graduating teenage couple set against the real events of the worst disaster to have hit the city. Its original staging was delayed by the pandemic, which has given its developers more time to work on the play with the additional input of high school students and is likely to be presented after the pandemic.
For Rogan, the tornado of May 1985 has left an indelible mark on his memory. He was at the downtown hospital working with a baby that afternoon and at some point he had noticed the sky had taken on an odd green hue and the pattern aloft struck him as odd.
“There was a dark line, a demarcation line of cloud, a straight line of cloud coming over,” he recalls in a recent interview with BarrieToday, just as another tornado watch was called for much of central Ontario. “There was an announcement on the public address system: ‘Disaster plan in effect — any doctor to emerge'.”
Rogan initially believed it to be another practice drill, but thought that calling one late on a Friday afternoon, with clinics no longer running, to be somewhat unusual.
He continued working on the baby when the disaster-plan announcement was repeated, and that prompted him to go to the emergency department, which is where he learned a tornado had hit the city near Essa Road and Highway 400.
“Getting down to emerg was interesting,” he says. “It was very quiet. It was a good 20 minutes to half-hour before we began to realize that something really serious had happened in the city.”
It was strange to be cut off from all communications with the exception of land lines, Rogan says. And there were only about four doctors in the emergency room at the time.
As the patients started coming in, Rogan recalls witnessing a scene unlike any other he had experienced working in hospitals in Canada and England.
“The patients came in covered in soil, glass, all sorts of debris,” he says. “They were in a camouflage of debris that we had to find a way through to the injuries.”
The patients were triaged so the most serious received immediate treatment, leaving others to wait in a triage area, which was actually the hospital cafeteria.
“The details stick in my mind of the young teenager who was brought in literally with her scalp taken off and she was bleeding. We had to stop that bleeding before we did anything else,” he says.
Patients were flowing into the emergency department, which quickly became overcrowded.
That volume brought Rogan to think back to more than 20 years earlier when he was working as senior house doctor at a Liverpool hospital in 1963, when the Beatles returned from their North American tour.
“There were so many people, thousands of people, receiving them at city hall. The fans of the Beatles, a lot of them got injured. A stampede. We had ambulances coming into our hospital every few minutes,” he recalls. “Well, it was similar to that. We had ambulances at RVH coming every few minutes into the delivery bay.”
Extra doctors did eventually arrive to help with all the patients.
Rogan’s day, which began with him working as a pediatrician and quickly shifted to that of an emergency physician, ended about 36 hours later.
“The relief came when we could just deal with the pediatrics. When we got enough surgeons in, and general practitioners and emergency doctors, as soon as they arrived we were able to concentrate and focus on the pediatrics,” he says.
He remembers the story of a nurse who had been driving along Highway 400 coming into Barrie when the tornado hit. She told him that the car levitated and it flew along before landing in a ditch. She was unharmed.
The following day, Rogan took a drive to the affected area and was shocked at the devastation.
“It was just unbelievable. ... It was breathtaking to think that not more people had been killed in the process. It was horrific, horrific."
Now retired, Rogan clearly recalls a situation that, in hindsight, he found rather eerie.
Just three days before the tornado, a 12-year-old girl had been referred to him with sleep problems. She had been having nightmares about a terrible storm. To help her cope, his office was going to set up a visit for her to a weather office to learn about weather and forecasting.
“It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, what the human mind is capable of,” he says.
Rogan fully retired from practising medicine eight years ago, after 30 years with RVH and then doing consultation work in Collingwood for several years. He is now an active volunteer with CARP and the Alzheimer’s Society.
