RALEIGH — A small but feisty crowd of state mental health workers rallied today against the pending closure of Dorothea Dix Hospital, saying the planned move to a new facility with unaddressed safety issues and serious staffing shortfalls is a disaster in the making.

“This is our Katrina,” said Beverly Moriarity, a nurse who helps coordinate staffing at Dix. “This is a train wreck waiting to happen. The administration knows it’s going to be a catastrophe and they’re moving ahead anyway. I don’t understand it.”

Following a report in Wednesday’s News & Observer about an internal list of unresolved safety hazards and design flaws with the new Central Regional Hospital in Butner, the Dix workers said the schedule for moving to the new building had been accelerated.

“They want to make the move a fait accompli,” Moriarity said, suggesting higher-ranking officials are trying to close Dix before opposition can build to stop them. “The risk is too great.”

Those speaking out Friday, many of them members of the N.C. Public Service Workers Union, said they were especially concerned about expected staffing shortfalls at the new hospital, which will draw workers and patients from the simultaneous closure of Dix and John Umstead Hospital in Butner.

Moriarity, who has worked at Dix 12 years, said the new hospital will open with at least 50 nursing positions vacant. Severe shortfalls in the numbers of doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists are also expected.

“There won’t be enough staff available in a crisis,” she said.

The true staffing shortfalls could be even worse than the projections, with several employees saying they had accepted transfers to the new hospital but were looking to get jobs elsewhere as quickly as possible.

Facing $4-a-gallon gas and a new commute to Butner well in excess of an hour round trip, some of the Dix employees said they just couldn’t afford the move. “Half of my salary would go to gas,” said Floyd Mims, a health care technician. The starting pay for his job is less than $11 an hour.

Chronic staffing shortfalls were among the problems that led to the recent decertification of Broughton Hospital in Morganton. The problems, which were identified in the wake of patient deaths, led to federal officials cutting off Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements to the hospital. That has cost state taxpayers at least $10 million so far.

The workers said the rush to open the new hospital is so poorly planned that their orientation to the new facility consisted of a two-hour walk-through of one floor of the new hospital. They were given a packet of instructions and told to read them at home.

They have received no training on how to use the computers at the new hospital, how patients medications are to be kept secure, or how to evacuate in case of a fire or other emergency.

Mims said it typically takes four days of orientation for a worker just to transfer wards at Dix.

“There’s no way you can do orientation in two hours,” said Mims. “It’s totally unacceptable.”