 "Photo: Rob Strong")
GALVESTON, Sept. 23 - A nurse waited anxiously Friday in the breezeway of the John Sealy Hospital at the UT Medical Branch. A man on a bicycle was bringing "important medical supplies," she told the UTMB police officer who guarded the entrance, and she was supposed to cover the package with a sheet and deliver it to a room in the children's ward.
Two women in scrubs were laughing and taking pictures outside in front of the entrance. The wind spat sand against their plastic safety goggles as they spun around and drank red liquid from a specimen cup.
"Those girls've been drinking," the officer said, shaking his head. "As long as they're not hurting anything, and as long as they belong here, we're being a bit more tolerant today."
The bicycle man arrived with a pet carrier from which a white-and-brown cat peered out, wide-eyed and puffed up. The nurse hurried out into the wind to cover up the crate. Animals did not belong here, and the officer called in for clearance.
But as the man on the bike was leaving, the wind was getting stronger, and Hurricane Rita was barreling toward the coast. The nurse grinned as she bustled down the hallway with the cat. This was the safest place on the island.
The hospital is a fortress on an island. Nine solid stories of concrete and brick housed a skeleton staff of doctors, nurses, police officers and technicians - fewer than 200 people all together. The rest of the staff, patients and the 400 state prisoners the hospital serves were evacuated Wednesday in 150 ambulances, 60 helicopter flights and 45 airplanes. It took them only four hours to clear the entire intensive care unit.
It was UTMB's first full evacuation in its 114 years of existence. Those left behind were volunteers and "E-1" staff - staff whose jobs were essential for emergency response after the hurricane hit.
All they could do now was wait for Rita.
'Waiting for a fight'
People were anxious.
A first-floor room was set aside for smoking - an unprecedented practice in a hospital. But it was safer than having people smoke outside, and they needed to calm their nerves any way they could.
UTMB executive director Andrew Deyoung asked Father Gerald Lewis, a missionary and priest at St. Mary's Cathedral Basilica, to perform a Catholic Mass service Friday afternoon for staff who wanted to worship before the storm.
"I woke up pretty stressed and overwhelmed and depressed, and I didn't know why until I realized I'd been so busy I forgot to go to Mass," Deyoung said. "I was going to have it brought to me, but then I thought, well that's pretty doggone selfish."
About 25 people, most with puffy eyes and tear-stained cheeks, gathered in a children's hospital auditorium for communion, song and prayer.
"Be present, O God, with those who wonder what they will find when they return to homes battered by wind and engulfed by flood," they prayed in unison. "Teach them to hope."
They embraced each other, smiling and whispering, "Peace be with you."
As the priest removed his vestment after the ceremony, Dr. Morton "Tito" Leonard, a senior radiologist, thanked him and invited him back Sunday. Leonard had helped Lewis administer the communion wafers.
Since the computer system he needed to examine X-rays was shut down, Leonard had been helping any way he could, meeting everyone and making sure things ran smoothly.
Leonard's family evacuated to San Antonio. He was offered the chance to be flown out of the hospital to a shelter when UTMB evacuated, but he didn't want to leave. The hospital is the safest, most comfortable place to be, he said, and he's fascinated by hurricanes. Leonard is a short, bright-eyed man in his 50s, genial and eager to understand the inner workings of the hospital.
Leonard probably knew more about the hurricane than anyone in the hospital. He bought storm-tracking software 10 years ago, and he diligently tracked the hurricane's speed and course online, following its projected path with tables and graphs. Each time the swirling eye inched forward on the radar screen, he called whoever was closest into his office to examine the map.
He bustled around the hospital, keeping everyone updated on the storm's progress and made his rounds to the cafeteria, the hallways and the security office, where UTMB police watched two rows of screens showing floor plans and feeds from surveillance cameras. He stopped by his computer, where he checked Rita's vitals once more - winds were now at 40 mph - and then followed another doctor through empty corridors to the emergency room dock outside.
They joined some doctors and police officers on a helipad overlooking a Galveston Bay ship channel.
Above them, birds beat their wings madly, some flying north, some south, some in dizzy circles under the racing ceiling of gray clouds.
Below them, palm trees bowed beneath the gale that shot up saltwater and battered the building.
The water in the ship channel was brown and choppy, peaking with frothing whitecaps as the waves broke against the marina. A rusty blue shrimping boat had broken free from its dock and drifted eastward.
"Before it's all said and done, that boat's gonna be in the middle of the damn street over here," said Brandon Wallace, an emergency room technician.
Wallace pulled his yellow slicker closer around his neck and leaned forward against the metal railing. Twenty feet down to his left, the traffic lights at the intersection of Harborside Drive and 10th Street shook precariously from their poles. To his right, a lamppost swayed back and forth.
One doctor held a camcorder while another pretended to be a broadcast reporter, clenching an imaginary microphone in which she bellowed, "I'm here in Galveston, and we're going to blow away, we're going to fly away!"
Ryan Erwin, a UTMB police officer, stood near the door talking to a nurse.
"I feel like I'm in a parking lot waiting for a fight or something," Erwin said.
His wife and three children had evacuated Tuesday, he told the nurse, pulling a picture of his youngest daughter from his wallet.
The pair could be seen in miniature trading baby pictures on a surveillance screen inside an office no bigger than a walk-in closet. The room was scattered with papers, snacks and Coke bottles. A map of the Texas and Louisiana coastlines - titled "Seawall Specialty" - spanned one wall of the office.
The office belonged to Korey Dominey and Roland Choate who, with surveillance cameras and databases, monitored all incoming communication and traffic. Any EMS, fire or Coast Guard visitors had to go through this office.
During normal business days, Dominey and Choate facilitate day-to-day operations, such as decontamination, stocking and patient reception. They're also qualified paramedics. They consider themselves the "grease and wheels" of the hospital, but Friday they were also its filter, screening any calls from outside UTMB.
Leonard poked his head in the door.
"We're now officially in the tropical storm," he said. The edge of the hurricane was still five hours away.
Chief cooks and bottle washers
Leonard continued on his rounds, pausing in the radiology hallway to speak to a lone security guard. A man in a fluorescent orange baseball cap joined them.
"This is Brian Zachariah," Leonard told the guard. "He's the head of the ER this weekend."
"I'm also the chief cook and bottle washer," Zachariah said, laughing and shaking hands.
The lights flickered in the hallway and the men glanced upward.
"Here it goes," Leonard said, as the wind moaned furiously, rounding the hospital's edges and echoing in its nearly empty halls.
Late that night, a bail bonds office caught fire and three injured people were brought to the hospital. Two firefighters had minor injuries and the woman they rescued suffered burns on more than 30 percent of her body. Hospital staff said that a transformer probably exploded, igniting the building.
But after that, the hospital was quiet.
"I could hardly tell there was a storm last night except occasionally passing by a window," said Marsha Canright, a spokeswoman for UTMB, Saturday morning.
Hurricane Rita made landfall as a Category 3 some 70 miles northeast of Galveston. For the most part, their little peninsula was spared major damage. Trees had blown over, leaving their jagged, splintered stumps standing, and debris was still skidding across the hospital's parking lot.
But the hospital staffers, who had been working since Wednesday, were tired, and their shift replacements were hundreds of miles away in shelters in Dallas, Tyler and Fort Worth.
The hospital's executive directors Michael Hill, Michael Megna and Andrew Deyoung met over breakfast to make plans for the full staff's return.
"It was easier getting people out than bringing everyone back," Megna said. "Our job is to figure out how to make that happen."
No evacuated patients would be returned until the hospital was fully operational. But the causeway was open, and people who had stayed to brave the storm would soon emerge from their shelters.
"Patients will come in as soon as people can drive," Deyoung said. "They expect us to be ready to help them."
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