Welcome to ZZ Sumter Regional Hospital

CRMC Delivers Aid to Sumter Hospital

Lori Glenn
— MOULTRIE — Moved to action by the destruction of Sumter Regional Hospital from merciless tornados in March, Colquitt Regional Medical Center (CRMC) employees, auxiliary members and hospital authority members raised $23,400 to help out.

The CRMC hospital authority donated $10,000 of the total, employees raised $7,500, volunteer auxiliary raised $5,000 and the medical staff and authority members individually donated $900, said a recent CRMC press release.

The presentation was made in front of the ruins.
“Just remember you are not alone,” Jim Lowry, CRMC president and CEO, told his Sumter Regional counterpart, David Seagraves, and other Sumter Regional employees and staff. “We and the other hospitals in the state will be with you.”

After the group joined U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop in hardhats and masks to tour the rubble.

Touring the wrecked hospital, CRMC representatives witnessed the devastation. They saw how wind had sucked wiring and pipes out of the ceiling and sheetrock off concrete walls. Wind was so forceful that it ripped off exterior walls and spiked sticks and pine straw into the sides of the buildings, CRMC Director of Marketing Gary Boley said.

They were shown a third floor obstetrics room that had an exterior wall missing and told of how a patient clinging to her newborn baby crawled through the darkness and the wreckage into the hall, he said, and warned rescuers not to enter the room.

“It is simply unbelievable! I have never in my life seen anything like it. I guess I would have imagined that if a tornado — even a big tornado — hit a building as large as Colquitt Regional Medical Center parts of the building might be destroyed, perhaps even most of the building. It is hard to believe that every single inch — every inch — would be totally destroyed to where there is not a room anywhere that was spared destruction. Then add the fact that nobody was hurt. ..,” said Boley.

CRMC employee Chrystal Vickers helped collect supplies and drove them to Americus immediately after the storm. She went back to Sumter Regional for the presentation.

“Hospital to hospital, we felt that as a facility we should help their employees. We would also hope, in turn, that if something like that were to happen in our community like that, we would feel sure that they would come to our aid if we needed it as well,” Vickers said.

Restoring the hospital will take a long time, she said. In the meantime, Sumter Regional is trying to keep as much staff working by rotating shifts and is working with employees who were personally displaced, she said.

“Going up there and talking with their employees and seeing what they went through, they were fortunate they didn't lose any patients, which is just amazing,” she said. “... It just was really amazing to see how they've come together and how the community has come together to do what they have to do to get through it. ... Having our employees step up and do what they did was just really tremendous and shows just what employees we have here.”

US Patent Numbers 7,720,998 B2, 7,836,207