Pipeline People
Dr. Leo Morresey
TAPS Medical Director

I came to Alaska in July and was seduced by the flowers everywhere, 80-degree weather, and people singing and dancing on the street. At the time, the pipeline was national news. The Trans-Canada-Alaska highway featured significantly because of the huge payloads of equipment and traffic traveling up to Alaska. It was one of reasons I came up to take a look. I was working in northern BC, and figured I would never get this far north again. While visiting here for a long weekend, I was offered a position as an emergency medicine physician. It wasn’t too long after the oil embargo and the north was being transformed by this great influx of industry. The population was pouring in, and oil and energy were humming high in everybody’s consciousness.

There was a young, vigorous, make-it-happen group of people: pipeline workers, engineers, electricians and welders were among the many who came here. I had been working with the Anchorage paramedics and I dealt with a lot of Alyeska Pipeline people who had been sent to the hospital. Alyeska wanted to revamp the medical system on the pipeline, and increase governance and control, including an upgrade of their corporate medical, beyond just field medicine. I had occupational training and experience in different industries, so I started working part-time for Alyeska. Eventually, I joined full time and I quite liked the difference. I had worked with hospitals and doctors and they are great people, but at some stage you want to wear something other than blue scrubs.

During the construction phase, Alyeska had medical personnel who were standard physicians, and physician assistants. In the maintenance phase, all of the major earth-moving and heavy equipment dangers had passed. People were more reliably healthy, without the injury treatment needs of a construction crew. The major risks and acute injuries in the field resulted from explosions. The big trucks hauling equipment up and down the rugged Haul Road were also a source of accidents. The typical nurse was not suited for stabilization of victims after bigger accidents in the field, such as burn injuries and extrications from vehicles. We were not out there to do comprehensive medicine, we were there to treat those injuries that occurred on occasion, so we created a medical program based on that particular need.

The first few years of building the system involved a nation-wide recruitment of appropriate personnel. We ended up with about 130 applications that looked strong for the 20+ positions. We interviewed them on site and picked out the best-suited for this kind of work. Living and working in this northern, remote environment is not for everyone.

Over the years there have been numerous events where we have made a difference. People that I’ve medevaced and certainly changed their lives. We may have saved their lives. We certainly relieved a lot of pain and suffering out in the field. There have been plane crashes, a whole array of bad asthma attacks, motor vehicle accidents where desperately injured people were literally dying. But, they made it, through good luck and good management from our medical system. We have relocated shoulders by remote instruction, which is very satisfying when you have people who are just so grateful to have their joints restored.

In more recent years, with the tourist traffic going up and down the Haul Road, we are exposed to hunters and travelers and people who don’t even know what environment they’re getting into. Little blue-haired la- dies from Kansas don’t realize there isn’t a convenience store at every milepost, have left their pills at home or lost their medicine. They may be out there inadequately dressed for the elements. There have been many astonishing kinds of situations. I’ve met a whole range of people, visitors who can’t speak English, Japanese tourists, Swedish tourists, bikers that have come all the way from Chile and pedaled from Patagonia to the North Slope. I still enjoy the challenge of conducting medevac rescues on mountains. In this setting, in the wintertime, maybe we’ve got only three hours of daylight. When there is an accident, we need to know whether to get a plane in there. Perhaps there’s some abdominal pain; is this appendix brewing or are we going to sit on this patient for 18 hours until the next daylight comes? What decisions do we make? How quickly do we do our set of evaluations? All of those things give me a bit of a high.

As unsettling as it is, it is exciting to make rapid decisions, and get them right. Safety and health run together. I was impressed with the ‘can-do’ attitude at Alyeska. If you can demonstrate the real need for things, you can get funding and get it done. It has been rewarding. You shape your own destiny in a big way. I think at the end of the day, the biggest difference you make in your own life is the difference you make to others’ lives.