Tatro enlisted in the Guard 27 years ago. In normal times, his unit plays at concerts, parades, and welcome ceremonies for visiting dignitaries, including the presidents of North Macedonia and Senegal. But the National Guard in each state is also a force that the governor can activate to help in a disaster—and in Vermont, the 40th Army Band provides much of the quick-reaction capability. In the past, this has involved filling sandbags for floods and chainsawing the occasional tree branch to remove it from the road after a hurricane. But this was something else altogether.

The story of how about 70 National Guardsmen managed to transform a convention center into an alternate health-care facility in mere days shows a state community coming together to get ahead of the pandemic at a time when the federal response is faltering. The military as a whole has struggled to adapt to the virus in its ranks—notably with the outbreak of cases on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and inconsistent guidelines to protect members across the services.

Read: An unhealthy military is struggling to fight COVID-19

But around the country, teams like the Vermont guardsmen and members of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are practically defying physics to relieve stressed local hospitals in record time. The Vermont experiment stands out among similar projects across the country for its speed—and shows that at least one piece of the U.S. crisis response, specifically at the local level, is working.

Donald Trump’s freewheeling daily briefings are the icon of the federal response, and stimulus money and corporate bailouts are making their way around the country. But much of the real work of containing the pandemic is being done at the state level, with governors managing stay-at-home orders and teaming up to coordinate regional plans. It often falls to state actors to take care of their communities.

The pop-up hospitals aren’t the famous Chinese mega-constructions such as the one in Wuhan that 7,000 workers built from the ground up in about 10 days in February. Rather, members of the U.S. military are converting existing sites around the country—schools, convention centers, other vacant buildings—into spaces for patients displaced by the influx of coronavirus cases, or even for COVID-19 patients themselves. Vermont isn’t even at a point where its hospitals are overflowing. But state planners were observing the worrying trends elsewhere in the country, and they wanted to get ahead of what might be coming. “It was absolutely essential to look at that worst-case scenario and have capacity to meet it,” says Kerry Sleeper, the interim deputy secretary for Vermont’s Agency of Human Services, who manages surge capacity in the state. “We would have been negligent had we not done that.”