The Vermont National Guard has begun taking apart its Covid-19 field hospital at Champlain Valley Expo in Essex Junction.
The original 400-bed facility was built in April 2020, as state officials feared an overwhelming number of Covid cases, and it stayed open until around the end of May. It housed some Covid patients, but primarily served other patients who needed longer-term rehab, to alleviate demand and density in hospitals and in residential care facilities.
Last summer, Guard members disassembled the installation and stored it at Camp Johnson in Colchester. It was reconstructed in smaller form — 250 beds — in November 2020, amid the winter surge, but was never used.
“It’s just exciting to see it come down,” said Marcus Tracy, acting deputy of the public affairs office for the Guard. “Like it feels like an omen of good things, hopefully.”
Over five to seven days, more than 25 Guard members will take apart the maze of plywood walls and plastic sheeting that divides spaces inside the Robert E. Miller Expo Center. In the hangar-like building, they sort wheelchairs and soap dispensers and electrical wiring into boxes and piles for transport. In the Covid wing, red masking tape still spells out “HOT ZONE” on the floor.
1st Sgt. Erin Graham said the Covid-positive wing of the facility never had more than six patients at any one time.
Graham has been in the Guard for 19 years and, in civilian life, is a physical therapist at UVM Medical Center. When her unit, the 40th Army Band, was activated in March last year, she helped construct various temporary health care facilities in Barre, St. Albans and at the UVM fieldhouse.
She spent much of that spring at the Expo location, supervising a team of about 50. They comprised the facility’s support staff, handling everything from paperwork to bringing patients their food.
“I enjoyed it, in the sense that at a time when the world was kind of going nuts, I was able to wake up in the morning and I had purpose to my day, and I knew what I was coming to do,” she said.
In recent months, the Expo site shifted to offering Covid vaccines, and so has Graham. Alongside other members of the quick response team, she has staffed vaccine clinics across the state at locations ranging from a Montpelier Mountaineers baseball game to a Shelburne vineyard.
She said she hopes this takedown of the Expo site is the last.
“I think it’s time. It feels good,” she said. “It is truly amazing what this group of people was able to do in such a short amount of time — more than once — but it’s no longer needed. The fair is coming for the end of the summer, and perhaps some normalcy is coming.”
