Dang, this thing, the whole season still seems so surreal.
Hurricane Task Force Meets in Beaumont
Reported by Scott Lawrence
December 13, 2005 - 2:17PM
By PAM EASTON= Associated Press Writer=
BEAUMONT, Texas (AP) _ In the hours before Hurricane Rita, Jefferson County Judge Carl Griffith couldn't find any ambulances to evacuate hospitals and had to beg the White House to allow an airlift of vulnerable residents.
"People were going to die in the hospitals. There was no doubt about that," Griffith told a state task force that is reviewing the state's evacuation plan after thousands found themselves stuck, sometimes for days, in traffic on Texas' highways.
"It shouldn't have taken a call through a political process to make that happen," Griffith said of the eventual military airlift of hospital patients out of the county.
By the time the military planes arrived, Griffin had authorized county workers to replace bus seats with mattresses and take patients to the planes, where they were flown to 17 different states.
"It was a very difficult situation for all of us," Griffith said.
The judge, the top elected official in the county, said he and others were frustrated at their helplessness in the natural disaster. Griffith concluded the only solution was to call on Texas' senators.
No ambulances were available because they had been dispatched elsewhere for similar evacuations as Rita's path from the Gulf of Mexico varied widely in the days before it made landfall.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison got a conference call set up with the White House, and Sen. John Cornyn joined in.
"I did melt down quite frankly on the phone," Griffith acknowledged.
He said he told the White House that "the blood is going to be on your hands because those people are going to die in the hospital."
The county judge said he refused to take no for an answer and political pressure seemed the only solution.
The White House agreed to authorize the dispatch of military C-130s to East Texas in the hours before Rita came ashore near the Texas-Louisiana border in September. Rita struck just weeks after Katrina destroyed parts of Louisiana and Mississippi.
Many southeast Texas homes were damaged or destroyed. Some residents are still living in tents along debris-lined streets.
"You would have had hundreds of deaths had that airlift not occurred," Griffith said, urging the task force to make sure a similar plea never has to go out again.
Kathy Rodgers, the trauma coordinator at Christus St. Elizabeth Hospital in Beaumont, said the group should also recommend that adequate medical supplies are available when hurricanes are churning in the Gulf.
Emergency responders who were trying to prepare and move patients ran out of supplies, such as oxygen, pain medication and dressings, she said.
And Rodgers said there was no way to track where patients ended up. Frantic phone calls came in from family members, but hospital officials had no answers where the patients had landed.
"We couldn't tell them because we didn't know," Rodgers said. "That was very, very difficult."
Rodgers suggested placing armbands on patients with contact information for the originating hospital. That way, she said the medical facility that takes in the patient can contact the originating hospital when they arrive.
"Just imagine yourself not knowing where your family member was," Rodgers said.
Task force chairman Jack Little said the group had not heard of similar issues during any of its other public meetings throughout the state.
Tuesday's meeting was the task force's final scheduled public hearing. The group also heard testimony in Houston, Corpus Christi, the Rio Grande Valley, San Antonio and Dallas-Fort Worth.
Little said the group will recommend ways to improve mobility and communications during evacuations, make sure fuel is available and determine how best to move those with special needs.
"Our focus is how to better evacuate the state of Texas' citizens along the Gulf Coast when we have a hurricane bearing down on us," he said. "We know we have got to do a better job."
(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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Governor's Task Force Gets Earful From Rita's Ground Zero
Reported by Angel San Juan
December 13, 2005 - 11:51PM
(Governor's task force holds hearing Tuesday at Lamar University's John Gray Center)
It was a military operation the nation was seeing for the first time.
But it was a last resort for the sick and elderly people who were trying to escape Hurricane Rita.
Hundreds of hospital patients had to be airlifted in C-130 planes from the Southeast Texas Regional Airport in the final hours before Rita's landfall.
Jefferson County Judge Carl Griffith told a Governor's Task Force On Evacuation that he had to cut through too much political red tape to get the airlifts.
Griffith says he was forced to call Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who then called the White House.
He says, "The airlifts have to be part of the process of the evacuation."
Not only was getting the special needs people out a challenge, so was getting them back home.
The Christus St. Elizabeth trauma coordinator, Kathy Rodgers, admitted to task force members that even the hospital's regular drills did not prepare the staff for Rita.
She says, "There was a trust that the communities had in the institution and healthcare facilities to take care of their family members, yet we didn't know where they were, we were trying to take care of them, but we didn't know where they were."
Rodgers says the local hospital community will meet Wednesday to review its emergency plan.
One recommendation Rodgers suggested was to have patients wear identification bracelets that would make them easy to track wherever they might end up.
City leaders also felt overwhelmed.
Lufkin which is an evacuation hub was not prepared for the number of evacuees that headed there.
Lufkin city manager, Paul Parker, says, "Our town probably swelled from a town of about 33,000 to about 70,000, we had every church open, even the ones that were not shelters."
Lufkin's resources were stretched to the limit, especially law enforcement.
Task force members learned about evacuee-related thefts, fights, and even a rape in Lufkin.
Parker says, "We learned that we didn't get enough security fast enough, and on Friday morning, we were near riot."
Complicating matters, Rita also passed through Lufkin causing lots of damage, and cutting electricity.
Parker advised the task force that the state pre-stage food, fuel, medical and other supplies including portable generators in the Lufkin area prior to mass evacuations.
He says Lufkin is in an excellent position to rapidly dispense supplies to affected areas on the eastern Gulf Coast as well as supplies to be utilized locally to assist in the evacuation.
The evacuation highways and roadways also had their share of desperate evacuees facing a fuel shortage.
Many spent more time in their cars then it took Rita to devastate Southeast Texas.
Some wonder if the order to evacuate came too late, but Judge Griffith defends the timing.
Griffith says, ""We called the evacuation I think on Monday. The storm didn't hit til Friday night...
Reporter interjects, "I thought it was Wednesday...
Griffith responds, "No, No That was a mandatory...we called for a voluntary evacuation which is all we ever called up until the law changed this summer. We've always called for voluntary evacuations when we call them and that's what we were doing. We're saying, here's your time, you got five days to get out."
Task force members say changes won't happen overnight, and possibly not before the next hurricane, but they know doing nothing is not an option.
The task force will put together a final written report that will be used to improve the state's emergency plan, and form the basis of new legislation.
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