 "Photo: Paul Chouy, Daily Texan Staff")
GALVESTON — Two weeks after Hurricane Ike touched down on the South Texas coast, Broadway Avenue remains desolate, its businesses shuttered and without power.
Although power has gradually returned to half of the buildings at the UT Medical Branch, the campus reflects the emptiness on the town’s main street. A skeletal staff of 300 permanent employees combined with even more outside contracts are undertaking the task of cleaning up facilities that were, in many instances, flooded with five feet of water.
However, much of the work on campus involves assisting the staff and students displaced by damage to the campus.
UTMB’s Employee Assistance Program has sent counselors throughout the campus during the recovery period to monitor the mental health of employees, who were often working overtime.
The emotional shock was even greater for employees who returned to the devastation after the storm.
“We’re getting a lot of shock and awe of ‘where is my city?’” said counselor Patrice Houston.
Houston and colleague Faith Evans have each seen between 50 and 100 employees in the last week for emotional counseling, but much of their work is done during “walkabouts” on the campus.
“An institution is really its people, and our people are all over the place,” said UTMB spokeswoman Marsha Canright.
University administrators said the hospital will probably not be operational for another one to two months. In the meantime, Kathy Shingleton, vice president for human resources, said her department’s biggest challenge is finding temporary housing for many of the 8,000 employees who work on the island.
Shingleton said 71 employees are sleeping in the hospital but couldn’t say how many had received benefits from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
A computer lab has been set up in the main administrative offices for employees to apply for benefits from FEMA.
Cameron Slocum, director of institutional strategies in the department of finance, said the financial damage to the campus totaled $600 million. The damages include the costs of cleaning buildings, replacing medical equipment and the lack of patient care.
The first priority for UTMB administrators is getting the clinical enterprises back up and running.
“We lose money every day we don’t have patients,” Slocum said.
The question hanging over the hospital as it moves to reopen is what kind of demand there will be for its services from returning residents.
“Even if we open our doors, we’re not going to have the same volume [of patients] as before,” he said.
The delays in actual research have also cost UTMB financially as power is restored to laboratories on campus. For every day UTMB researchers cannot work, the university cannot bill their salaries to their research grants. Until they can go back to work in their labs, the university will pay the researchers’ salaries from the available university fund.
Pathology professor Scott Weaver said that although research labs were not damaged directly by the storm, the failure of backup generators required the rearrangement of materials and the delivery of hundreds of thousands of pounds of dry ice.
Weaver said researchers planning to submit for grants from the National Institute of Health will get an extension for the storm, but he expects a delay of two or three months for current research teams to completely return to work.
Saturday afternoon, residents close to the campus were returning to survey damaged properties.
UTMB medical students Taylor Carter and Sarah Clay returned to their home on Church Street just south of the campus for the first time since evacuating the island.
A five-and-a-half-foot waterline was evident on the bottom of the house, the interior of which was not damaged.
“Everything that makes the house work is down there,” Clay said.
Before returning, Carter and Clay were living in Houston, where power is still out in many parts of the city. Carter said many of her classmates found apartments and houses flooded upon returning to Galveston.
“We’re thankful we’re not pulling our lives out to the corner,” she said.
UTMB is encouraging students with homes left intact to provide space for classmates still looking for temporary housing.
First- and second-year students in the School of Allied Health were notified via e-mail that classes will resume Oct. 6 at the College of the Mainland in Texas City.
“Probably a vast majority of the students didn’t have power, and the school is sending all these e-mails to us saying do X, Y, Z,” Clay said.
Despite those frustrations, she said she understood the difficulty of communicating with students.
“A hurricane hit, so what can you do?” Clark said.
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