Heroes
of the Storm, Part Three
We Will Recover, Despite the Worst
HOUSTON—(Jul. 9, 2001)—Pico Mina, vice president and chief facilities officer at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, had been awake all night listening to the rain. When his phone rang at 3 a.m. on June 9, he knew something was wrong. And what he heard confirmed his fears - the torrential rain that had battered Houston overnight had struck the Texas Medical Center with particular vengeance. The UT-Houston Medical School Building was flooded - how badly, no one yet knew. Streets were impassable - but Memorial Hermann Hospital next door had lost power and its basement was full of water. UT-Houston couldn't expect to come through unscathed.
Mina worked the phones the rest of that early morning, calling other facilities operations staff, keeping administrators informed, and trying to find out how bad things were. He had no electricity, and the streets surrounding his home were underwater. Finally, at about 6:30 a.m., he was able to venture out to see what Allison had wrought.
A drive to work that normally took 10 minutes stretched out to over half an hour as he avoided high water. Once he arrived on campus, he could see a huge job awaited him and his staff - there was more than a foot of water on the ground floor of the Medical School Building at 6431 Fannin, and water completely filled the basement. The storm had struck so quickly that millions of gallons of water had filled the basement in less than half an hour. Plus, there was no electricity.
"The first thing I saw at the Medical School Building was the loading dock, which was completely full of water," said Mina. "It was just a huge pool. It was unreal."
Mina quickly realized that his staff had two priorities - maintain emergency power in the building in order to preserve as much refrigerated research material as possible, and pump out the water. The building's infrastructure was predominantly centered in the basement, and no one knew how much damage had been done there.
"The restorative work has really been a valiant, cooperative, and collaborative effort by facility operations, environmental health and safety, and remodeling services," said Mina. "Plus, we have been working with the people most affected by the flood - the Center for Lab Animal Medicine personnel, the neurobiology and anatomy department, the medical school faculty and staff, and Dr. (George) Stancel, the interim vice president of research.
"Vaughn Construction, Exxon/Mobil Corporation, and the Houston Fire Department - all of which worked gratis - have been a huge help to us, as have Way Engineering and Texan Electric," continued Mina. "This was a real disaster, and I don't know what we would have done without them." It took four days of around-the-clock pumping to vacuum out the more than 10 million gallons of water in the Medical School Building.
Mani Palani, UT-Houston director of engineering, was the first person to venture into the Medical School Building the morning of June 9. He woke up at 3:15 that morning, with the storm still raging. He took his car and tried to drive to the TMC, but high water made it impossible. He turned around, dropped the car off at his home, and proceeded to wade through in the dark, video camera in hand.
Palani walked all over the area, waiting for dawn so he could record what he was seeing. Water was everywhere - in buildings, filling lower levels of parking garages, several feet of it in the streets. What struck him most was the silence - an area normally teeming with cars, sirens, pedestrians, buses and construction was completely still. He couldn't even hear a bird. "It was so quiet it was eerie," he recalled.
"Mani's trip the morning of June 9 was both courageous and foolish," Mina said. "He captured historical footage that will be invaluable as we reconstruct, but in the process he put himself at serious risk. He had no idea what he would find in the buildings."
What he found was, in his words, "a catastrophic disaster." Palani entered the medical school, from the back because Fannin Street was too flooded. A foot of water was still standing in the ground floor, all of the electricity was out, and it was pitch black. He gradually made his way to the "leather lounge," a large sitting area in the center of the ground floor that features leather furniture.
"It was obvious that all of the furniture had gotten wet and was ruined," Palani said. "The place was a total loss." He approached a door that would lead him to the basement. When he opened it, what he saw made his heart sink. "The stairwell was full of water. Not only was the basement flooded, so was the stairwell leading down to the basement. It was an unbelievable sight. I knew then that we had a tragic loss on our hands - the animals housed down there, the research, the computers, the laboratory instruments, the anatomy lab, everything was gone."
Since that morning, Palani and the rest of the facility operations, engineering, and environmental health and safety crews have been working, on average, 14-16 hour days, without a single day off. Vacuuming out the water was just the beginning. Crews also had to restore power, pump in dry air to inhibit the growth of potentially dangerous mold, sort through all of the debris, salvage as much material as possible, and inspect the building's structure. This was especially important, as the force of the floodwater was so strong that it destroyed cinder block walls between the Medical School Building and Memorial Hermann's basements.
"The first few days were really rough," said Palani. "It became so bad that eventually all you could think of was trying to find a place to take a nap."
Eventually, the water was pumped out and several specially trained UT-Houston Physical Safety and Environmental Health and Safety staff members could go see the basement. "It was a shock," Palani said. "It looked like a war zone down there. Light fixtures were hanging loose from the ceiling, walls and parts of the ceiling were collapsed, everything was ruined. It's going to be a long, painful process to replace everything."
In addition to the loss of the research labs, the anatomy lab was also destroyed. Because anatomy is a basic required course that every medical student must take, it is imperative that new labs are built and in working order by the time the fall semester begins - a scant six weeks from now. This looming deadline is requiring a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week construction schedule. The pressures of the various deadlines are starting to take their toll on Palani.
"I've started to have nightmares about the things that can go wrong now," he said. "The night before we turned the power back on, I had a nightmare that the entire electrical system blew up and the building caught on fire. It's going to take a long time to recover from this."
Kent Cavender escorts federal, state and local officials through the remains of the medical school basement.
No one knows that better than Kent Cavender, the director of physical safety at UT-Houston and it's "field general," according to Mina. Before coming to UT-Houston, Cavender was a captain with the Port Arthur Fire Department. In his 12 years there, he saw firsthand the wreckage that can be left by a disaster. But dealing with the aftermath of Allison was a whole new ballgame for him.
"You're at a loss when it comes to telling people they've lost years of work," he said, shaking his head. "Telling the researchers here that we're sorry, but all of your animals are gone, your research material is unusable and your computers have shorted out has been the hardest thing for me to deal with."
Cavender arrived at the medical center that fateful Saturday morning already knowing the Medical School Building had been flooded - the UT Police Department had called his house at 6:30 that morning to tell him. His first stop was the School of Public Health, which had water in its basement and no electricity. Cavender assisted Ron Shields, the superintendent of construction and maintenance, in getting the emergency generator working. Next was the Dental Branch - more water in the basement. In addition, blood samples in the depository were going to be ruined unless he could get the generator going. Cavender worked on the generator's air handler, and, once assured that the samples were safe, headed to the medical school. "I got here about mid-morning on June 9, and I don't think I've left since," he laughed.
"The cyclotron (a device that accelerates charged particles along a spiral path) was gone, animal research was devastated, and the anatomy labs were demolished," he said. "I've been here so much that, a few days ago, I actually got home one night before my daughter went to bed. When I walked in the house, she yelled, 'Who's that stranger?' It's funny, but it's true. Everyone has been working flat-out, trying to do as much as possible. We have very dedicated people who work here, and we've been aided by companies and groups that have really gone above and beyond - for instance, fire station number 33 was out here pumping water for hours and hours without a break. The only good thing I can say about this storm is that it's really brought people closer together."
Cavender rejects the title of "hero," however. "I'm no hero - I'm just doing my job," he said modestly. "The doctors and nurses over at Hermann, and all of the other affected hospitals around here, are the real heroes."
Bruce Brown, safety manager of chemical and biological safety
Few people know how truly terrible the devastation was in the medical school firsthand. One who did, however, was Bruce Brown, manager of the chemical safety program. Brown was one of the first people to venture into the basement, crawling over debris and wading through more than a foot of residual water while wearing a full hazardous materials (HAZMAT) suit and a self-contained breathing apparatus. Brown had to get to the basement, in total darkness and with no air conditioning, in order to measure the air safety and check the status of the magnetic resonance imaging units.
"I went down there with a representative from the magnetic resonance unit manufacturer so he could determine if the machine's systems were intact," said Brown. "This was quite scary, because we didn't know how the flood waters might have affected the supply of compressed gases for these units." Although the units were ruined, the cryogenic gas reservoirs were still intact and were safely purged without incident.
Next on Brown's list was coordinating the removal of the 4,700 research animals that had perished in the flood, and the specimens in the damaged gross anatomy lab. "That was really hard for everyone," remembered Brown. "Not just physically, but emotionally, too. I was really proud of how well everyone did during a really stressful time."
Dr. Robert Emery, executive director of environmental health and safety, agrees with Brown. "This particular group had to do some of the more unpleasant tasks, like getting out the animals and clearing the morgue. They were working in 97-degree heat, in HAZMAT suits, with no cooling system and in the dark. They had to break down doors that had been twisted by the force of the water, and crawl over lab materials. It was hot, wet, and dark, and very unpleasant."
Brown remembers those first days after the flood as one long stream of constant work. "Quitting time was whenever you were on the verge of dropping from heat exhaustion. The vice president of research, George Stancel, would demand that people go home because they were in danger of getting seriously ill. It was a very difficult time. Plus, some of our people had flood damage at home, and all of us lost our offices."
As cleanup efforts continue, a host of decisions will have to be made. "This flood really opened our eyes. We have to figure out how to minimize our losses in the future, how to improve our electrical and fuel supply systems, and develop a better flood control plan," said Palani.
But all of the planning in the world can't protect everything, as the Texas Medical Center is finding out. "We can rebuild," offered Cavender, "but I don't have any idea when we will recover."
— Shannon Rasp
Also read: Heroes of the Storm, Part One | Heroes of the Storm, Part Two