Nowhere to Run
If you are from a smaller place and you move to a bigger place, everyone in the smaller place likes to warn you about all the bad things that can happen to you in the bigger place. When I was in the Navy I was stationed in the Washington DC area, which was [...]
One of the most fascinating, and terrifying storms was the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. It was what would be called today an “extreme storm”, most definitely the storm of the century with a loss of life of officially 8,000 people. A book that tells the story of how this tragedy unfolded, and how man’s arrogance [...]
Storm Fever
Sometimes, when you have a plan it is best to just stick to it. There was this RV dealer who had done his best to prepare for a storm that was headed his way. He had his insurance up to date, his lot clean and secure, all of his units prepared as best as [...]
Low Tech to the Rescue
No piece of existing technology is as out of style as the lowly pay phone. If you can find one, you probably want to blast it with Purell before you put it to your ear. When someone sees you talking on one, they either feel sorry that you can’t afford a [...]
The Naranja Lakes Men’s Club
There is a pretty famous picture of a Royal Palm tree from Hurricane Andrew. The tree is about 75 feet tall. About 60 feet up there is a two by four impaling it. That tree survived for many years with that piece of wood sticking out of it. The wind gauges [...]
Raining Cats and Dogs
For all the things we do to become expert at storm preparation, we have never been able to satisfactorily resolve what to do about the pets of essential staff. We have tried, and failed, several times. From a practical standpoint, sometime the only thing keeping a critical member of the team [...]
Clarity
Donna Weise was the Chief of Pathology, one of the youngest in the country, a magna cum laude graduate of St. Louis University and the Medical School at University of Missouri, a Phi Beta Kappa. That is quite the curriculum vitae and I wondered how much brainpower, perseverance and money it had taken to [...]
There was a tragic storm in the Florida Keys in 1935 that caused enormous loss of life and total destruction of much of Monroe County. I highly recommend a fascinating book on the subject called Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean by [...]
Hospitality
It is critical that a hospital remain a hospital during a crisis. A real hospital, not a warehouse, or a school gymnasium, or any other vacant space that converts to a general shelter. For better or worse, people see the hospital as a general community resource. We tacitly encourage this thinking, after all, think of [...]
Outliers
You think you know people. We work with each other everyday, sometimes for years or even decades. So what happens to us when we are put under pressure, sometimes extreme pressure? For the most part I think people act in a way that is reflective of the way we see them everyday…..but not always. There is [...]
