Storm Landfall

William H. Golod, Ph.D., College of Pharmacy

“It just so happened we were doing drugs studies for pharmaceutical companies and we had twenty-four mattresses…that were to be put on the floor for the subjects during the studies. Those were available for those people who had to ride out the storm at the College. And we basically took the two classrooms up on the third floor and put twelve mattresses in each room. And if they had sleeping bags or things like that, we’d open up the faculty members’ offices and that's where we all slept.”

“The biggest problem we had was that there was four feet of water on the first floor and we had too much furniture to move… It all went--it all got soaked underwater and so on. And I'm telling you, the water was up at least four feet halfway up the wall and in the short period of time.”

“We had about fifty or sixty [students], probably closer to sixty from the three programs that were still on campus [during the storm]. Then we had faculty…and workers. So we probably had about a hundred twenty five [people].”

Sherry Gillespie Miller, R.N., Children’s Hospital

“We were checking on making sure everybody was okay, the patients were okay, nobody was upset. It was about, I want to say ten-thirty, it might have been nine-thirty, I was actually in the Main Hospital with some of my counterpart directors…talking about what we’re going to do next when my beeper went off to say that the windows in the Children's Hospital in-patient units were blowing in. So, that's when it started and I don't remember stopping for about the next twenty-four hours after that. We got over there and I guess the direction that the storm came -- I mean, those are very heavy windows, if you've ever looked at them – and they were blowing in. So, the first thing we did was, we had to evacuate all the children out of their rooms into the hallways of the units thinking that would be far enough. But then, I don't know if you've ever been on those units, but there are windows into each unit so you can see the kids. And so there was another set of windows so we eventually decided that that wasn’t going to be enough and we started evacuating into the main hallways of the Children's Hospital.”

“We eventually cleaned out a large storage room on the eighth floor, which had no windows and was just an inside area, and moved as many of the infants and toddlers into that room as we could, and then had to still use the hallways. At some point in time in that, when all that was happening, the eighth floor connected to the Main Hospital through the newborn nursery, and this is probably later into the night, one o'clock something like that, the ceiling between the Children's hallway and that room started to fall down. We couldn't evacuate that way so that’s when we started going, “Okay, we're going to use this closet and we’re moving them out into the hallways.”

“…we had talked about how much of a surge we could have before we would lose the emergency power. So, we were down in the generator room looking to see how high the water was, and it was probably at the most a foot from going over. And so we were discussing did we need to go ahead and evacuate the building when the word came that the windows in the PICU, the wall that didn't get boarded up, had blown in. So, we're running up eight flights of stairs. …then we had to evacuate those kids out of the PICU…over to the adult burn unit, and right after we got over there, the Main Hospital lost their backup power. So, the nurses were having to hand ventilate the kids that were on ventilators, and the Children's Hospital never lost power. Of course we didn't know that at that time. Somewhere through the course of that, the tenth floor -- what was known as the Palmetto Pavilion then -- the roof began to leak and be pulled off, and insulation was falling down and coming down the stairwells.”

M. David McDaniel, Children’s Hospital Pharmacy

“Everyone was trying to decide what we’re going to do next, who’s going to do what. I was assigned the task of babysitting drugs on the ninth floor and that’s where I spent the height of the storm from about eight P.M. until about eleven-thirty, and out there by myself with my little cooler, listening to that storm and it was quite a noise.”

“The Children’s Hospital had been open two years…but the ninth floor was pretty much gutted and we had congregated most of the stuff by the central elevators on the ninth floor. So I was far removed from any window. You couldn’t see anything anyway, as it was dark and it was all wind and noise-nonstop. I don’t know if you have ever stood by a train as it goes by at high speed, but that was the sound I listened to for two and half hours. So, it was an experience. It was an experience.”

“…we were pretty much without electricity; we had flashlights in stairwells. But once the eye broke, once the front wall came through, everything was just absolutely silent: there was no noise; there was no wind, there was no anything…”

“[I] watched the storm surge come in. And it was coming -- it was going up about an inch a minute and got to within about four inches of the edge of the loading dock and then started to recede, which was good because that kept the first floor from flooding.”

“…everybody was getting very nervous come one A.M. and one of the things that I remember, my director, Bill Miller, and his two co-directors were on site -- Ken and Greg -- and the word had come down from the top bosses that everybody on site had to be identified for obvious reasons… What I remember was Ken and Dr. Miller coming around, taking our name, our next of kin and issuing us arm bands with our social security numbers on it. These were patient ID arm bands…That’s when I could feel the panic set in on the staff because here we are being identified in case something happened. We were in the safest building you could possibly be in; this was -- that building was built in fifty-five to withstand an atomic bomb. So, I had all confidence in the structure of the building and those folks that didn’t think about that, or didn’t know about that, were very much afraid all of a sudden. Not that they weren’t afraid before but to have someone put that arm band on you, it sort of really got your attention.” “I can recall at the height of the storm, I went up to PICU which is on the eighth floor of the Children’s Hospital…Dr. Fred Techlenberg who was one of the attending physicians in the PICU… [was] standing up in the window -- now the window is a good three feet up, four-feet up from the floor -- and it’s a big window; it’s probably four or three-by-eight window and it’s all one piece of glass. The maintenance guys are there, trying to put plywood up and there’s Fred, throwing himself against the window, all 130 pounds…”

“The big challenge that the intensive care units had [was] when we lost power then all the respiratory therapists had to hand bag these patients until they reestablished power.”

Victor E. Del Bene, M.D., Medical Center

“Sometime during this whole thing, and I don't know whether it was before the eye or after the eye, there was a determination, because the windows were starting to buckle and open in the Children's Hospital intensive care units, to move the children -- to move them. And, these children were the ones that were hooked up to things like breathing apparatuses, IVs, cardiac this and that, all kinds of different things sustaining them. And, we moved them over to the place that we previously prepared over in the Clinical Sciences Building. The problem was that you had to go through the front of the building, which was opened. So, since we didn't have all new equipment over there, you had to move the equipment, and you had to keep the equipment specific for each baby. "Okay. Take baby so-and-so. Take him out and get ready." "Okay. Who's going with the baby?" And, two or three people would go. Put him on a -- I think the elevators were working. They'd put him on the elevator, drop down to one of the crossing places, and one baby with a group of nurses and doctors at a time, they went across. When one got across, another one would go, and so forth and so on. So, –if I remember this correctly, this is what happened.

Then all the power was off. It was all off. It was a real problem because we had no water, no power. That meant there were no alarms. So, if there was a fire, we were really in bad trouble. And, the adult intensive care unit had no power. So, the staff began to actually provide respiration for each individual that was in there, which we had not moved because we couldn't have moved them, with a hand respirator. They were taking turns doing that. It was hot in there. It was dark except for the flashlights. People were working very hard. They were very tired -- the staff. And, they were spelling each other, keeping the respirations going on these patients.”

“…we had people in every nook and cranny who had decided that this was going to be a safe place for them to stay. I mean there were people who were family, our extended family here, and they decided it was going to be a safe place to stay. We didn't anticipate that, and that was a problem, and remained a problem for a couple of days because we couldn't get our water going and we had no air conditioning, no functioning fire alarm system or sprinkler system.”

Gail Stuart, Ph.D., R.N., Institute of Psychiatry

“The storm came in the evening, which added to, what I think, was the eeriness of it. It came through with a lot of wind initially, as the gusts took off, and what we realized, fairly early in that process, was that the roof of the Institute must have had kind of a gravel layer. And, all of a sudden, all of the loose pieces of gravel, started coming down and hitting the windows of all of the patients’ rooms, creating quite an uproar, not to mention everything else in this whole atmosphere was swirling around. That created a good bit of anxiety. People were afraid.”

“It was eerie, though, that right when the eye of the storm was over us, some of us came downstairs, and as furious as the previous winds were, with everything hitting and blowing, it was absolutely still; there wasn't a breeze anywhere. And, of course, the water had come in, so when you looked out the doors, you saw that the water came over the parking meters, if you can imagine how high that is. So, you couldn't see the parking meters at all. And it looked like you were looking out on a lake. And it was so still, kind of that movie-scary-something-bad-is-on-its-way stillness.”

H. Biemann Othersen, Jr., M.D., Children’s Hospital

“I remember going down to the first floor of the Children’s Hospital in the rear and watching the water come up the steps on the back of the Children’s Hospital loading dock area and you could watch the water. The first floor of the hospital was above ground level, but you could watch the water coming in and it went up to a height of about six-eight feet and then it receded but it never did threaten our generator which was very comforting to see.”

“…the wind was so strong it actually bent those windows [in the Children’s Hospital] a little bit. And when it bent them, the window would fly open and it flew open and of course then the glass would shatter and the patient doors from the hallway into the rooms opened into the rooms. So that with all that wind coming in, it was impossible to open the doors. The wind was so strong; one person couldn't open a door.

So because of that, we had to move all of the patients into the halls because if the window in their room shattered, we couldn't get into the room because the wind just kept the doors shut. In the intensive care unit, the maintenance people, and I must say, the maintenance crew were really on top of things; they really responded all over the hospital and in the intensive care unit, they were putting up big sheets of plywood over the windows because we couldn't move those patients, they had to be in the unit on ventilators.”

“[Maintenance] started putting up big sheets of plywood. I watched a window that had been blown in, and the wind was pushing the plywood down. It took eight men to hold a sheet of plywood up there while somebody drilled holes and screwed it in. The force of that wind was really strong.”

“There was water in the corridors a couple inches deep just from the water being blown in, and the water leaking through the roof.”

“Well, it was very eerie when the eye passed over because the wind had really been howling like banshees and it was breaking windows and you could just hear--it was like a freight train outside. But then when the eye of the storm passed, it was eerily quiet--nothing.”

Peter B. Rock, Carpentry Shop

“I guess it was around nine-thirty, ten o’clock, is when the wind started picking up, and at that point, it was just a curiosity; we were just watching it. It seems that the front of the storm wasn’t that bad. We had some windows fail and of course, our reactions was, “Well, let’s go deal with it.” So, we were picking up water, trying to fix windows, and the wind wasn’t that bad, we can do that. And then the eye came and there was quite a relief, everybody was like,“Oh, this is cool, this is over with.” It wasn’t so bad, but you know, the word was going out, “Oh, by the way guys, we’re in the center of the storm.”

“At one point, I had to go help the manager of the supply room cross Jonathan Lucas to get some more supplies and were wading in waist high water and we assumed that was the worse of it. Well, that got a lot higher. It was really when the back of the storm came that things got interesting. The wind got so incredibly high at this point now, windows were failing, they’re being smashed out…”

“The windows were failing terribly in the Children’s Hospital and the other thing that happened is we lost water pressure so none of the toilets would flush.”

Hal S. Currey, Institute of Psychiatry

“And I realized that our building [Institute of Psychiatry] had glassed reflective windows. In the daytime, if you looked, it would be mirror from the outside. At night, with lights on inside, and off outside, it was a reflection inside. And so, I am in the phone to my wife and watching that window and all of a sudden, I realized that the glass was bowing. It was moving in and out. And I, this was my very word, I said to my wife, "Holy shit. I got to get out of here." I said, "I'm sorry. This is dangerous", and I said, "I'll call you first thing in the morning or do whatever I can do."

And I slammed the phone down and got out of there and we switched from trying to secure the windows to trying to secure the doors into the rooms.

Well, it turned out that something like five or six of those things blew. They just shattered and turned into these unbelievable shards of glass that looked like daggers. They were, you know, like 18” long, and came to razor point. Each edge on it was like a razor.

One of the offices, which belonged to a guy named Randy Wald who was on the faculty at that time, his office looked like an A bomb went off in it. You know, when that glass came across it, it just sliced up all the furniture and all that stuff. And had anybody been in any of those rooms, they would have been dead. And so my fear was good and rational.”

“…during the eye, George Arana and I went out on Doughty Street and stood there and watched the water come down the street from the Ashley River… [We] watched the water and it came up to the parking meters. You know parking meters? Got that head on them that holds the money and all. It came right below the head of the parking meters and stopped.”

Fred A. Crawford, M.D., Department of Surgery

“At about eight o’clock at night, I’m grading abstracts. The wind was blowing a little bit and it was probably at forty, fifty miles an hour, but my office was on the lee side, the wind was coming out of the south-east to east I guess, because of the spin of the hurricane, and my office was on the west side, so I was sheltered, I thought, from the winds.

One of the nurses…Grady Hardy ran in… She came in my office and she said, “You got to get out of here.” And I said, “Why? No problem here.” She said, well down on the, I think it was the first floor, the office that was comparable to mine at that level, she said all the windows had just been “sucked” out and the ceiling collapsed. And I said “Whoa I’m leaving.” I mean I literally left everything on my desk, got out and locked the door, and not twenty minutes later, the windows of my office were sucked out, all my papers were sucked out into the wind, and the ceiling collapsed on my desk. And without that warning, I think I’m too big to get sucked out, but I probably would have got my head banged around a little bit.”

“The hospital was sort of quivering. Windows were blowing out. At that time, now, we were running around the hospital. The power’s out and we had some people on ventilators, and there were no ventilators because there was no power because the emergency power failed. We were in ICU hand-bagging patients for ventilation, and the windows blew out in ICU, and in the NICU upstairs and that was a mess.

And so we’re sort of constantly shifting patients to where the rain is not pouring in, where the windows are not blowing out, whatever it takes to keep things going. It never was a panic, never a panic of any kind, but it got there for about two or three hours where it was really hectic. I think more than one of us thought about how we are going to survive this thing.”

“I can remember the cross walk, that goes between the hospital over Sabin Street to what’s now Hollings Oncology, I guess. I walked down there. The street was covered with water and not only that, there were white caps on the water. I walked Dr. Edwards down there. I said, “Come here. You’ve got to see this.”

Tony von Kolnitz, Engineering and Facilities

“When the tide, at probably three o'clock in the morning, when the tide started going out of its own accord, it was like somebody had pulled the stopper out of the tub, and the water rushed out of here as fast as it rushed in. “

“An interesting story about that time, we were still working [during the storm], we were procuring, did not put—when I say procuring it, we were getting it, we— one thing that we did that could be faulted in hindsight, we kept all of our nuts and bolts so to speak, that we were using in our storage room over in the parking garage. Julian, our storage shop foreman, was tasked with…“Go get me a wrench. Go get me a this. Go get me a that.”

… He finally got to the point where he said he swam under water, across Jonathan Lucas, between the Clinical Science building and the parking garage over there. He found it easier to swim underwater knowing it was salt water across the street than to walk across the street in that wind.”

“And we really started to feel it, it was about 9:30. The wind started blowing, and windows started popping out, and from 9:30 to about 12:30 when the eye came, that was the hellacious part of the storm.”

“[There was] a young lady who took it upon herself to go around and get everybody’s name. And then she showed up about thirty or forty minutes later with a hospital bracelet for us to wear so they could identify our bodies after the storm… I said, “Lady I don't plan to die.” She said, “You're gonna. The buildings are gonna collapse.” That was not needed at that point in time.”

“Two of the most heroic deeds that I saw was, it was still dark, about five o'clock in the morning, and we lost the main hospital’s generators. The water from the city quit coming, too. To make sure that it was—I'm not placing fault here, but—the city's fault and not something we had done, Don Barr, our maintenance supervisor and Elison Kelly, my number two in command who took care of the maintenance side of our operation, went under the hospital in chest deep water, not knowing for sure whether another hit of water was going to come get them, to check, to see if we were getting a water flow [from the city] to the hospital. Don Barr was doing the work and Elison Kelly went under the hospital to hold the flashlight. Now, that's not to say that Elison couldn't have done the hard work, but Don Barr needed somebody to hold the flashlight. And I count those guys as both heroes for risking that.

Elison Kelly is squeamish about cockroaches. He looked up one time, and he said there was not a place on the ceiling of the, under the building, which is crawl space, that he could have put his hand and not touch a cockroach. They were manning all the dry spaces under the hospital. So, I count Elison a hero for going under there with that situation, and just how nasty it was.”

“Then when we lost power that was a disaster. And I heard stories that physical plant workers held flashlights so the nurses could hand ventilate the infants in the ICU while the change over was going on. And as I say it was about forty-five minutes there where they didn't have anything. And you know, I applaud those physical plant people that held the flashlights. They provided the light for the nurses that were going to do the big work.”