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  • Hurricanes Katrina and Rita: Professionally Fulfilling, Personally Painful
  • Wayne J. Riley MD, MPH, MBA, FACP (bio)

My experiences with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were both professional and personal. As a New Orleans–born physician, I was honored to be among the health care professionals and the legions of volunteers in Houston and Harris County, Texas, who contributed to the coordination and provision of medical care during a time of national crisis. The mobilization of health care and disaster medicine resources in Houston and Harris County was perhaps, surpassed only by the city of New York's response, post-9-11. It was, indeed, Houston's finest hour.

When the first planeloads of evacuees arrived in Houston on August 31, 2005, few of us could imagine how my adopted hometown would be changed, likely forever, and how we would be tested as a community. I could not guess then how gratifying it would be to care for some of my fellow New Orleanians who, overnight, became both my patients and my neighbors.

On a personal level, the arrival of my parents, two adult siblings, one niece and one nephew at my family home in Houston created new and unexpected "up close and personal" interactions that challenged us all. Indeed, the Riley family "Feng Shui" soon became unbalanced. In the blink of an eye, the census in our four-bedroom household went from four to twelve. My sister and her husband and their two kids lost their home and all of their possessions to Hurricane Katrina. My parents' home in New Orleans was heavily damaged and rendered uninhabitable, until just recently, due to extensive wind damage and a proliferation of mold. They, too, lost most of their personal possessions.

To add insult to injury, my semi-retired father, Emile Edward Riley, Jr., M.D. (Meharry '60), arrived at our doorstep in poor health after an 18-hour journey by car that normally took five and one-half hours. Within a month and a half—just after Hurricane Rita bore down on the southeast Texas coast—he would enter a Houston hospital and suffer a massive stroke that would leave him profoundly dysarthric and hemiplegic for the rest of his days. This turn of events was particularly painful to me, as my dad was and is my first hero (his Katrina-damaged Meharry diploma adorns a wall in my office). These dialectical experiences, seared into my consciousness forever, are not unlike those encountered by many others in the aftermath of two mighty Gulf Coast storms. [End Page 229]

Houston's and Harris County's Finest Hour

As the vice-president for health affairs and governmental relations at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and chairman of the Harris County Hospital District Medical Board, I was among a small group of medical staff leaders that sprang into action when evacuees began to arrive in the city. We quickly decided that the best venues available to create a local "Katrina Clinic" were the aging and somewhat mothballed "eighth wonder of the world"—the Houston Astrodome—and the downtown George R. Brown Convention Center.

On August 31, 2005, the first trickle of evacuees began to arrive at both sites. A mere two days later, a torrent in excess of 20,000 people flooded both facilities. Many had not changed clothes or had much food in days. More important to the health care team, many had no access to their medications or to routine dialysis, nor did they have medical records or even pill bottles to authenticate their prescription needs. Their medical and dental providers back home could not be reached because, like the Houston evacuees, the caregivers, too, had fled the floodwaters to find refuge in communities across the region and around the nation.

To coordinate care and to make quick decisions about how best to organize what seemed like an impossible task, representatives of Houston Mayor Bill White's office; the county executive, Robert Eckels; Harris County Hospital District's CEO, David Lopez, and the health care infrastructure of Texas Medical Center; and, the city of Houston came together at a makeshift command center.

The needs were many: sphygmomanometers to take blood pressure readings; glucometers...

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