As a teenager, I often enjoyed tracking storms on a map, fascinated with the changes in speed or direction that hurricanes would take. I watched the news every few hours and used the updated coordinates from the weather to see that it was not coming to my hometown of New Orleans. Each time, we would track the storm together as a family, until it arrived on land. We also made plans each time for things like high velocity winds (e.g., bringing plants and lawn items in, taping windows, etc.), though rarely did we have more than a moderate storm that brought down a few trees. I suppose that as I grew older, I came to believe the storm would turn away, as it always had in my lifetime. I just didn’t think about it any deeper than that because of so many previous warnings that did not result in disaster. Forecasting a hurricane path is challenging to say the least, and they can shift in velocity and direction quickly—as evidenced just a few weeks ago with Hurricane Ian in Florida.
After I became a nurse on night shifts, I was often too preoccupied to spend time tracking storms. As a travel nurse, I spent most of my time working or preparing for work, and it was common for me to miss out on the news and current events for several days at a time. I would catch up on things when I had two or three days off in a row. So, during hurricane season in 2005, I had barely heard of the storm when it was almost upon us.
I woke up in the early evening on Saturday, 27 August 2005, and got ready to have a late lunch with family. I had not heard about the storm danger until I overheard a television in the restaurant saying that the “contra-flow emergency plan” would begin shortly. This plan would turn all interstate lanes outbound from New Orleans to allow people to evacuate. About that time, my unit manager notified me that I would be on the relief team and could evacuate with my family. I began to watch the storm on the news, but I still did not really expect to evacuate. Finally, just after midnight on Sunday morning, the mayor was on the news, urging evacuation and lamenting that he could not make it a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans. That was when we decided to go.
Inwardly, I laughed at myself for thinking of evacuating and wrestled internally with the decision until finally leaving around 2:00 a.m. after finishing up laundry for the kids (ages 2 and 11 at the time). Ironically, I forgot that my own clothes were still in the dryer, and unintentionally I left the house with only the clothes I was wearing. We headed over to Houston, Texas, USA, and were fortunate to find a motel in which to spend the rest of the night. Sometime on Monday morning, I was finally able to contact our family members who hadn’t evacuated. They told us that everything was ok there, so we began driving home. We were unaware that the levee had broken not far from my aunt’s home and the waters were rising steadily as we headed home. When we arrived, we found the roads were no longer clear there, and officers barricaded the route to turn us away from going home.
We went to my nearest family in Baton Rouge. When we finally did get back into New Orleans, we found our home was completely destroyed. Fortunately, we had family members that were in California seeing the devastation on the news. They acquired an RV and brought it out to us for temporary use. We parked it near my family in Baton Rouge, where my immediate family was safe. I returned to the hospital in New Orleans to work. Those of us whose homes were ruined slept on stretchers between shifts, so that we could continue providing care for those in our community who needed us. I would stay in the hospital between shifts, then leave to be with my family for a few days. It was very difficult, but having a job was a rarity in these times, even as a nurse. The local hospitals were all devastated, and we were the last non-government hospital still functioning in the area.
Out of necessity, we all “soldiered on” moving bed to bed, silent tears stolen between rooms, asking patients about their homes and confirming family safety and resources to help them find some sense of relief or recovery for their families. Our unit fielded calls from agencies all over the nation, trying to locate relatives for children who had been evacuated. One nurse had a cell phone that still worked, and we all shared it to contact relatives. I remember passing medications as helicopters passed every few minutes, the sound echoing through the halls. The soldiers came through with huge guns strapped to their backs. They were running security routes through the building because other hospitals in the area had been invaded by gunmen raiding the pharmacy stock. The sights and sounds I experienced seemed surreal and in stark contrast to the lifesaving clinical measures we tried to deliver. I remember having no time to mourn and being unable to even discuss my experiences with others like me. The other nurses were experiencing their own losses, and most did not have the emotional energy to even discuss it. After a few days, the Disaster Medical Assistance Teams (DMAT) had come to help, and they set up in our parking lot. They offered support and shared the skills they could offer to survivors. They mentioned Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) techniques used with responders. On our unit, they encountered something they told us that they hadn’t been prepared to expect. Many of us were in a unique situation, as both a survivor and a responding professional. This was just one of many things that Hurricane Katrina showed that emergency response professionals were unprepared for. When it got to be too much, we were sent to employee health. They provided medicine to help us sleep between shifts. Then all too soon, it was time to wake up and help the next person.
I remember receiving donated socks and undergarments. I remember being so very thrilled for the handful of crackers and warm soup that the dietary team brought us. None of us knew if we would have dinner; we only knew our patients needed us. I remember taking showers in muddy well water to remove the sweat. We’d been told the lab checked it for pathogens and approved it for showering and toileting. I remember learning that air conditioning units are not considered vital and were not supported by generator systems. Though my children were safe in the moment, the looming uncertainty of the future kept ringing back. “Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming” kept echoing back to me, helping me smile when I thought of my daughter and her favorite movie.
Many of us who lost homes lived in the hospital or in hotels between shifts. I would drive back to my children and then return to New Orleans when I was scheduled to work. I continued commuting for almost four months, hoping to find a home and reestablish my family in New Orleans. Unfortunately, we could not find housing in the area, and I could not leave my children behind any longer. It was time to move. We made the heart wrenching decision to leave my hometown. Fortunately, I found a job in Texas quickly as an experienced travel nurse. It took many years to recover fully from the effects of Katrina, and I consider myself one of the “lucky” ones. In my view, the terrible experiences made me a better nurse and a better person. I consider it a point of growth.
In 2015, the communities around us in Texas were devastated by multiple tornadoes the day after Christmas. Because of my experiences with Katrina, I felt compelled to assist and joined with a few other healthcare workers in what became a pop-up case management style program. We called it Family TRACE. The community came together, and each affected family was given a volunteer as champion to help them locate needed resources. This organization evolved in response to the disaster and served to cover the gap between the onset of the disaster, and the implementation of local charitable organizations. We delivered contact information for charitable organizations, and even delivered donated goods and furnishings to those who needed help. In 2016, I also was able to work with the city, and establish the Family TRACE donation center for disaster recovery that helped families for almost two years after the event. One of the biggest lessons I learned in disaster recovery is that you don’t need to be an ER nurse to make a difference. Any nurse can join in the disaster recovery and response process—you only need the heart of a volunteer who cares enough to help.
Many organizations offer opportunities to spread the message of disaster preparation. Volunteering with Team Rubicon as a “Greyshirt” is a great experience in cleanup and recovery. Many “Greyshirt” volunteers are deployed now, all around Florida in response to Hurricane Ian. Our local Girl Scout council collaborated with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to do a disaster preparation training that my daughter and I attended together. Since then, we have used those skills to volunteer with emergency management personnel across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. FEMA offers continued training, which we used to connect with the local Citizens Emergency Response Team (CERT). As a nurse, it is extremely exciting to see the emergence of a new professional organization, the Society for the Advancement of Disaster Nursing (SADN). This group is organizing and growing to helps spread disaster preparedness education among nurses across the nation. Nurses have the right skillset for these difficult circumstances; we also have a responsibility to teach others how to mitigate the risks they can and be prepared for the risks they cannot control. We each must find a way to get active in local and global communities, doing what we do best—helping people!
Katherine “Kat” Kreis, MSN, RN, CHSE, is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Arlington – CONHI in Arlington Texas, USA. She is a member of Sigma’s Delta Theta and Epsilon Nu at-Large Chapters.