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By the time the first patient arrived at the old Pratt & Whitney airport at Rentschler Field Sunday, the long-retired runway seemed a perfect place for the state’s first outdoor, mass vaccination site in the war against COVID-19.
It wasn’t planned this way.
The operation that was hurriedly set up over the last several days by Community Health Center Inc. will inoculate as many as 1,000 people a day, making it Connecticut’s largest vaccine location as the state races to inject millions of residents by ths summer.
They’re calling it the “Vaccine Village” — with 10 car lanes, seven temporary buildings, generators, lights, electronic signs, portable bathrooms, even its own FM radio station for people to tune in for instructions. All of it on an airport runway that was home to the likes of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart when Pratt ushered in the age of aviation 90 years ago.
It’s staffed not only by CHC, which has clinics all over the state, but also by the Connecticut National Guard, LAZ Parking and the state Department of Transportation.
“This is a massive undertaking if you think about the time we had,” said Mark Masselli, who founded Middletown-based Community Health Center in 1972 as a free walk-in clinic and is still the CEO. “We’re proud of it, but we want to give credit to the state of Connecticut, to Raytheon, to the city of East Hartford, to Department of Public Health, the National Guard, all of our contractors who have come out to work.”
Yes, it seemed like a natural idea for a mass vaccination location on a windy Sunday afternoon when Barbara Keyes rolled up as the first customer — and kept rolling past the awaiting staff, revealing a glitch that was easy to fix. It’s all the more remarkable considering as recently as last Monday, six days before the opening, this location wasn’t on anyone’s drawing boards.
The football stadium plan
Masselli and his staff arrived at Rentschler Field (the football stadium, not the airport) next to the historic runways last Monday, Jan. 11. A few days earlier, state officials had asked CHC to set up a large, outdoor vaccination site. The stadium seemed ideal; CHC already had a drive-through testing operation there, it’s right off a highway exit, and there was plenty of real estate.
Masselli and his people had spent the weekend drawing up plans for the vaccination operations. Alas, the Rentschler Field folks told them it couldn’t work. The large, unpaved lot would not hold up in the event of snow, and the paved lot was used by Foodshare to give out food once a week, a cornerstone since the coronavirus recession started last spring.
Meredith Johnson, the CHC chief of staff and an operations expert, walked over to the vast wall of windows on the upper floors of the stadium and gazed out. Just past the lot, she could see Cabela’s, the only commercial tenant on the 600-acre Rentschler site, which has been on the market for development for 25 years without success.
She looked to the left.
“What’s that thing? That’s perfect for vaccines,” she said, re-enacting the conversation with me on Saturday from the same windows. It was an old runway — paved and jet-sized, not a little strip. Johnson, from Iowa, didn’t know about Pratt’s airport.
No one knew whether the runway — now owned by Raytheon Technologies, Pratt’s parent company — would be available or would even work logistically.
“Let’s just drive down. Let’s go see it,” Johnson said. “So we all got in our cars and we drove around and went all the way to the back and we went down there and we saw it. And I said, ‘This is great.’”
The first runway they saw was in use by the State Police for training. Then they came across another giant runway, not in apparent use, just over a fence from the vast Pratt manufacturing complex where WASP engines rolled off the line to save the world two generations ago.
Lights on, vaccine in place
Right then and there, last Monday, they started laying out what a vaccination operation would look like and how it would come together. The next day, Tuesday, Masselli and state officials were on a hastily arranged call with Pratt and Raytheon people.
“They couldn’t have been more cooperative,” Masselli said. No charge, of course. They reached a legal agreement instantly.
At 4:29 p.m. Saturday, under darkening, churning winter clouds, workers from Griffin Electrical Contractors of Southington hit the switch on the main generators, 600 amps to power the village. Temporary lights were already in place on the runway because they’ll have to work in darkness if they want to hit the 1,000-a-day target.
Anthony Graziani of Winterberry Gardens, also in Southington, conferred with Masselli about more gravel. I asked about landscaping. “We may put in some planters,” he said, “to spruce it up a bit.
After spending the weekend on the scene with all these people, watching this logistical symphony happen, I can say it isn’t as easy as you might think. The details simply never end.
Here’s one important detail: You need an appointment through the statewide registration system to get a vaccination. If you show up without one, you’ll make an immediate left and follow signs to the exit.
On Sunday, just before 1 p.m., Mary Blankson, the CHC chief nursing officer, and Natalie Bycenski, the head of infection control, arrived with the Pfizer vaccines in a large, white cooler. They carried the cargo into the Connecticut High School Coaches Association Hall of Fame, a locked room in the stadium filled with plaques and photos, where CHC had installed one of those super-deep freezers.
“Here’s the tray,” Blankson said inside the room. Pulling out three vials for Sunday’s test run, she read aloud the expiration date to Bycenski, who recorded it. When she opened the freezer, her smart watch pinged to tell her it was opened and it told her the precise temperature, minus 79 degrees Celsius.
An hour later, the two were loading syringes in a temporary building on the runway. The vials made more than the planned number of doses, and they talked about needing to find more patients. “I haven’t had the vaccine yet,” Bycenski said, though she was eligible as a health care worker doing direct patient care.
Roll up your car and your sleeve
That’s when Barbara Keyes rolled down Lane 5 in her light gray Subaru hatchback. She’s the grandmother of Amanda Schiessl, project manager at CHC, who has been on the Vaccine Village site all week.
“Keep going, you’re good,” someone said to Keyes as she rolled up to the temporary overhang between two temporary buildings. And she did keep going — 100 feet past, before stopping as Schiessl ran after her. No worries. Immediately, someone started working on a sign to let drivers know where to stop.
Blankson administered Keyes’ inoculation smoothly, and the next driver was Jessica Wolf, a music teacher from South Windsor who wasn’t even part of the test. She had been approved for a vaccine, logged into the VAMS vaccine management system and was sent to Rentschler for her vaccine. “Yesterday was my birthday,” Wolf said. “What a present!”
In all, Sunday was just a test run for 15 people but it was real — they registered through the system and showed up like 400 will come Monday, and more after that.
The buildup of vaccination capacity is working, Josh Geballe, the state’s chief operating officer, said Sunday.
“We’re going to be standing up multiple other similar sized sites,” he said, confident Connecticut can inject as many doses as the state receives — including a hoped for 96,000 this week, the largest cache yet. “It’s all hands on deck. All the providers are stepping up.”
They’ll have to, if Connecticut is to inoculate the 1.3 million people in Phase 1B, starting with people age 75 and over. Seeing the vast operation at this former airport and realizing 1,000 doses a day is just a small part of what’s needed, drives home the scope of this effort.
CHC, like the big hospital systems, has the structure. With 13 clinics including in Stamford, Danbury and Norwalk, and well over 100 other service sites in schools and other places in Connecticut, CHC saw 300,000 patients last year, mostly on HUSKY Medicaid, with 1 million visits.
Masselli, both a dreamer and a pragmatic operations guy, summed up the day Sunday.
“We have to kick the tires on it,” he said, “but I think it went well. I think we’re ready. It will be a different operation a week from now than it is now.”