Pre-Storm Preparations

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

“The College [of Pharmacy building] was located off of Calhoun Street, and we already knew that in heavy rains, just heavy rains at high tides, water came into the first floor of the college.

So, the question then was, what do we do with everything that was on the first floor? And where would we move all the furniture that was on the first floor? The big thing was, we had a very big ongoing manufacturing lab back in Building E. The whole first floor of Building E was a pharmaceutical manufacturing operation, and because of that, it would be flooded… There were hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of very expensive equipment back there.

So the question was can we move it? And the answer was no. It was too big and too expensive. And we would, because of the sophisticated nature of much of the equipment, we'd probably lose it anyway in the rush to move it and then have to move it back. So, we just decided we would go ahead and we would barricade as many of the doors as possible to keep water out and moved all the equipment into what seemed to be the furthest room.

The next question was what do we do with students? And are faculty safe? Do they have a place to go? So what we did, and I think all the deans did this, every faculty member had to give us an address where, if [Hurricane Hugo] were coming, they were going to [go]. The students had to do the same thing. And those that had no place to go, then the question came up, what we would do?

On Wednesday, the word went out to the students, “Go to where you told us you were going to go. If you [do] not have a place, pack a suitcase, a small suitcase up with your clothes and other toiletries and so on, and come to the College.”

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

“I remember coming in on Monday morning, and they called all of the nursing directors and the administrators together and we started meeting to plan what would happen if the hurricane hit. And I remember thinking on Monday, this is probably, you know, we've done this a million times. This is going to be the same as everybody else's. And then by Tuesday, it seemed a little more serious and we were talking about backup generators for the Children's Hospital and things that made it seem a little more real; how much water the military could bring in, all those kinds of things. And then by Wednesday it was definite. You knew when you came in to work on Thursday morning [you were] going to be here for several days.”

“Two days before the storm, we created the very first emergency day care center because the staff were saying, “I'm a single mother, I can't come to work,” whatever. So, I remember having to go meet with Charlene Stewart, the CEO at that time, and then over to meet with Marion Woodberry, he was the vice president at that time to say, “We have to be able to do something or we're not going to have staff be able to come to work.” So, on the fifth floor of the Children's Hospital…we had a very long hallway and waiting room, open areas for the Children's Clinics. And so we created the very first childcare center there. So, some of my staff that were clinical nurse specialists in whatever, their job became to staff the emergency day care center.”

“I remember that we had charged the staff what they needed to bring with them, you know, as far as a sleeping bag and some other things. I remember telling everybody to bring peanut butter and a loaf of bread.”

M. David McDaniel, Children’s Hospital Pharmacy

“We were pretty convinced, as an organization, that the hurricane was going to land fall close, if not right on top of us, on Tuesday. So, the emergency plan was sort of set in place on Tuesday evening, Wednesday morning. Those of us that were deemed essential, which I was one of those deemed essential, was given time to go home on Wednesday to batten down and get our families taken care of.”

“I then reported to work…on Thursday morning. And by then…when the organization decided that it was coming our way, plans were put in place and actions were taken to transfer as many patients as possible from the university. At that time, we probably had 140 -- 120 patients in the Children’s Hospital… We were able to transfer a vast majority of the patients to other institutions so our patient population was greatly reduced of what it had been.”

“Our biggest population was in the neonatal intensive care unit where we couldn’t transfer any of those kids because nobody else -- being what we were, which was the regional NICU; we had no place to transfer those sick, sick kids. So, on the Tuesday and Wednesday before the storm hit…our most critical need was hyperal total parenteral nutrition for these children. So, we set about producing a three-day supply of this particular product for these children. …that was a big crunch on Wednesday to try and get that done because we had no idea how long this was going to last. My supervisor at that time Gail Johnson, came out with the idea of a…three-day supply of the drug… We knew it would be stable chemically and physically so that was a big push for that Wednesday to get everything ready as far as we could and to prepare those medications that we knew were going to be needed in the next three days.”

“When I reported on Thursday morning, pretty much the three-day supply of drugs had been prepared and we were ready to evacuate that portion of the pharmacy, which we did by mid afternoon. Those of us, those able-bodied men that were available were assigned to vacate the first floor of the Main Hospital. It was deemed that there was a great risk of flood if the storm surge was of any size. All day Wednesday, all day Thursday, the reports were getting worse and worse and worse in terms of the power of the storm. So, Thursday morning, there was about six of us and the pharmacy stock room, or distribution center was located on the very first floor in One West…back behind the cafeteria. Our job was to move everything off the first floor and so we spent most of the late morning, late afternoon moving the items from the stock room up to the ninth floor which at that point in time…was actually under renovation. It was totally gutted actually -- it was empty. So that’s where administration deemed that all of the products from the pharmacy stock room and central supply, and laundry had to go.”

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

“…we started to worry about the storm a few days ahead of time…We were particularly concerned with the fact that the front of the hospital was open because the piece that you see in front of the hospital now, that tower, was just being built and the façade was not on. It was just columns -- I think steel and cement columns. And right adjacent to it was a builder's crane that was just sticking straight up in the air… I remember asking one engineer about that…construction tower, and I said, "Well, is there enough time for you to take it down?" And, he said, "No, don't worry about it, Doc. We'll just take the brake off and we'll let it go around like a weathervane up there. It will be okay." It wasn't really reassuring at that time.”

“They were going to bring a truck that's called a “bladder” which is full of water, and they were going to put it up on the second or third floor of the garage across from the Clinical Sciences Building. We talked about how many people we could take care of and what we could do to "bleed down the census." In other words, people who were ambulatory could leave -- were being discharged as time got closer and closer.”

“The idea was to prepare as much as possible. Because we were particularly concerned about the babies in the neonatal intensive care unit; that we wanted to have another site that we could take these babies to. And, so, I remember that on the sixth floor of the Clinical Science Building, the Physical Plant actually tapped into the water, and the electricity, the oxygen, and suction apparatuses and they constructed in the hallways a whole set of new, I guess you would call plumbing, in case we had to move intensive care over there.”

“I remember the head of the animal unit, Dr. Swindle…was concerned about the fact that he had about as many animals to worry about on the campus as we had people… He was trying to make some arrangements so that they could keep up their air conditioning and water.”

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

“For us at the Institute of Psychiatry, we began preparing by discharging patients when we realized that it was really coming towards us. We started to discharge as many patients as we could from the inpatient units. Unfortunately, many of the patients could not be discharged; we didn't have a place to relocate them to. And we also had a children's unit, and some of those children also had to stay, so we prepared by moving all of the patients who were on the first floor, up to the taller levels, the higher levels of the building, because we were expecting what, twenty-foot tides, they said.”

“…for faculty offices, we removed computers from windows; we knew that there was a lot of vulnerability, because there's so much glass in the building. And so, we tried to wrap things in plastic as much as possible.”

“We then started doing the essential processes, which were sandbagging, putting sandbags along all of the doors, not knowing if the water would come in or not… In addition, we started stockpiling the things that we thought we would need, and we began to talk about staffing issues, in terms of the clinician coverage that we would need. As we discharged patients, we knew that we didn't need all of the staff we would normally need, but we did say that the nursing staff were essential personnel, and we limited the number of essential medical staff.”

“And what we suggested to people, and this was again, two or three days ahead of time, “Bring in sleeping bags, any kind of things that you'll need for the next couple of days,” and since we didn’t really have space for them, what we did was we opened the faculty offices, on the faculty side, the older building, and allowed staff to kind of claim an office and hunker in, and nest with their families, so they could have a place to put their things.”

“We stocked up on peanut butter and bread, you know, did all the things that you would normally think about, such as unplugging electrical equipment, and getting the area as safe as possible.”

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

“The biggest concern at the time was that the governor had ordered a mandatory evacuation. The hospital was not in favor of that because to evacuate sick patients, we felt was a greater risk than keeping them here in the hospital. Because everything we do in medicine, we have to balance risk against benefit. And to move a very sick patient, who happens to be on a ventilator, to move them somewhere beyond the reach of the hurricane would entail in itself a lot of risk. And looking back on it, I think we were justified in making that decision not to evacuate.”

“Other preparations that were made were to ask the nurses to be prepared to stay in the hospital. The emergency team that were deemed to be essential to the running of the hospital were also asked to bring in water, clothes, or whatever was needed to stay two or three days. Because it was felt that if there were a bad hurricane, the hospital might be isolated for a few days and you wouldn't be able to leave.”

“What we tried to do was to evacuate or discharge all patients who didn't absolutely need to be in the hospital. We discharged as many as we could; we didn't admit any new patients. There were no elective cases done for two or three days before the hurricane hit so that we wouldn't have any of those patients in the hospital recuperating. So the only patients left in the hospital were those who were really, really sick; who were on ventilators; who required intensive care; and we didn't have anybody in the hospital who was just recovering from operation or had a condition that could be treated at home or somewhere else. So that's the way we prepared for it, was getting out of the hospital all those who didn't really need to be in there for maintenance of their life-support systems.”

“Well, the total medical center was about five hundred beds and I think we were down to less than two hundred patients in the whole medical center. I know in the Children’s Hospital, we were down to about half of, or less than half of our capability and the ones that we had mostly were children in the intensive care unit and the neonatal ICU. Those little prematures, there was no way we could send those home. And that's where most of our patients lay in the intensive care unit, in the pediatric ICU, or in the neonatal intensive care unit.”

Peter B. Rock, Carpentry Shop

“It seemed to me that the department started getting concerned about it after that weekend before the storm. So when we came in on Monday, we worked our usual shifts but we were being constantly informed that ‘we’re keeping an eye on this thing, we’ve got to be careful.’ They were planning who would stay and how that would play out. And I think at that point, we were probably cleaning roofs, looking for debris around the campus. It was just normal pickup, not real serious ‘get ready for a storm,’ but just get the debris cleaned up. The things that take the most time. It was on Wednesday when they told us to go home and prepare our houses, and plan to stay over.”

“My division was actually concentrating on windows: windows and doorways and anything where water and wind would compromise. We went around the entire campus checking windows, securing them. In some cases, we actually fastened them permanently because they wouldn’t latch well. So, there was a lot of labor intensity to that to make sure that these windows were going to hold.”

“…that afternoon or that evening when it became more evident the storm was coming this way, we did go up into the eighth floor NICU and we boarded up most all windows in that unit.”

“We actually theoretically abandoned outlying buildings. We closed them up, we turned off their power, and everybody centralized themselves in the hospital proper. So, the garage offices were closed, all the outlying buildings were just closed down and shut down so we didn’t have to man those buildings.”

Hal S. Currey, Insitute of Psychiatry

“…we discharged as many patients as we could. I think maybe, all children and adolescents, and there were a few adults left, maybe 20, 18 or 19 or 20.”

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

“I can remember - daily, sometimes twice-daily meetings during the week or so, and certainly the few days before Hugo, leading up to it; in which we talked about…the essential employees, how we would provide coverage, what we would do with our patients, were we going to stop admitting, when we were going to stop operating; that sort of thing.”

“I packed up some clothes, and some food and I had a police scanner radio… A few things I thought I would need, and I went back to the hospital early on Thursday morning to begin to make preparations. By that time we had - again this is kind of memory that’s a little fuzzy at this point - we had decided to divide into two shifts as I recall. Those who would come and stay for two or three days, and then the other team, and the rest of them would evacuate, and then at the end of twenty-four, forty-eight, thirty-six hours whatever, that group would come back to town and relieve us. This had been done for nursing, for administration, for physicians and whatever.”

Tony von Kolnitz, Engineering and Facilities

“We had been preparing basically hard for all week. And what we were doing first of all, we made certain that all of the generators were topped off with fuel. We could have run four or five days without getting any more fuel.”

“Now, there were certain buildings that we left alone, like the Wellness Center for one thing. We didn’t—we gave the Wellness Center to Hugo. It was his because we simply couldn’t handle every building.”

“We had sandbagged the entrance to the boiler room. That turned out to be a stroke of genius as it was, because it held water out of that room the entire night. I went down there, I guess during the eye, and I was a little bit amazed that there was hardly a drop of water on the floor of the boiler room.”