Ike Makes Landfall on Me

(Hey it's Austin. I have been told to inform everyone that last night when he sent this email at 2:00 AM he was in no kind of good mood. Not to worry however, he says he is doing much better now after a good nights rest.)

It’s 2:00am and I’m falling asleep on the keyboard, but I wanted to touch base really quick because today was an exhausting, busy day - up running around like crazy in the middle of the night, a brief nap at 5:30am and then running around like crazy the rest of the day. I sat down at 4:00pm to take a “chair nap” – chair next to wall, pillow behind head, feet propped up on another chair – but I hadn’t been sitting for 10 minutes when the walkie talkie snapped, “Come back Brad.” “Brad?” “I’m here,” I cursed, and then got up, put on my tennis shoes and went back to settle the most recent petty crisis I had been assigned.


Today I got completed frustrated with all the busy-ness. I was exhausted, sore, running non-stop at the beck and call of the Incident Command Center in the hospital. At the height of my irritation I ran into one of my favorite nurse managers, and she was sobbing. A nurse of hers had just learned that her house had collapsed into the flood waters on Galveston. Her husband had been one of the Islanders who did not evacuate, and now the nurse was distraught with worry that her husband might be dead. This manager is one of my “Chief Morale Officers”, with lots of energy and a great smile, so seeing her in such grief was unsettling. And then, for the next 15 minutes, everywhere I walked I either heard or overheard people repeating similar stories of damage to their homes, sudden homelessness, family members they could not reach. Many were expressing the shock of realizing they didn’t know if they were better off knowing what had happened to their homes or NOT knowing.

As I walked back to the Incident Command Center, I was reminded of the scene from “Titanic” when Rose finishes telling her story of all the lives lost to the sea, and it is obvious on the faces of the treasure-hunters that they “get it” for the first time. It had suddenly dawned on me that all of the stuff we’ve been doing has not been about managing this “incident”. We have asked these scores of employees to focus their energy on caring for those who are suffering and in need, during an historic natural disaster that has caused many of them horrific personal loss. Because of our mission to care for this community, these folks subordinate their own personal needs to the needs of the many. And they have done it magnificently, all the while knowing that some degree of personal catastrophe waited for them outside.

And I cried for the first time since this all started.