Down By Ice

Grace Tisdale was awakened on the morning of Dec. 5 by a noise "that sounded like rifle fire followed by a crash." What she heard was a tree limb falling on a trailer in her Granville County backyard that housed her 91-year-old mother.

A neighbor ran to the trailer's front door and could open it just enough to see that Tisdale's mother was all right. But with trees continuing to crack and fall around the trailer, Tisdale knew she needed to act quickly.

I ran to the garage to get the golf cart and then remembered the garage door had an electric opener and we had no power," said Tisdale, a hematology employee at the medical center. "It is a double garage and the door is so wide that I could not raise it up manually. I was frantic because I knew I my mother could never walk that far or over all the ice."

A neighbor, Thomas Faircloth, was able to unlock the garage and he and Tisdale managed to open the door just wide enough for Tisdale's mother to squeeze out. They made a perilous journey to safety at Tisdale's house, where they waited for daylight. That's when Tisdale really got scared.

"The entire area looked like a bomb had dropped," she said. "Three trees had fallen and were leaning on the sagging roof of a storage building. Another tree was leaning on the roof of my husband's workshop. A huge tree, just a few feet behind my mother's, had fallen away from her place with such force that it was completely uprooted. Another tree had fallen across the cement walk where we had just led my mother a few minutes before and landed about six feet from her bedroom."

Tisdale's harrowing story was similar to those of other Duke employees who survived last week's ice storm. As of Thursday, many employees were among the thousands who still remain without power.

The storm also hit the Duke campus hard. But because most of the campus is on an underground power grid, Duke was one of the few places in the Triangle that never lost power. Soon hundreds of employees in search of warmth and power were moving onto campus with their families, parents, dogs, cats and birds.

One such shelter was at the Franklin Center on Erwin Road, which not so long ago was a residence hall. There was something of a dorm feeling once again as cots were brought in and offices were turned into sleeping areas. Children watched Nick Jr. shows in the downstairs lounge. The conference room was turned into a large dining hall, and child-friendly movies were shown on the room's projection screen.

"The Franklin Center provided much more [than shelter] -- neighborliness, real community and hospitality, and a thousand small and large efforts by many among its staff to make a difficult experience bearable and even fun," said Anne Whisnant, a Mellon Project manager at the center who brought her family to the center on the nights of Dec. 6 and 7, before power was restored at her house.

At the medical center, officials dealt with other kinds of emergencies resulting from the storm. The recent bout of severe weather kicked the Duke Emergency Department staff into high gear as they began treating scores of weather-related injuries. The most notable and perhaps least expected storm-related injuries were due to carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning. (As of Tuesday, 185 people had been treated at Duke for CO exposure.)

Carbon monoxide poisoning is a potentially fatal condition caused by inhalation of CO, a colorless, odorless, highly poisonous gas that is formed by the incomplete combustion of carbon from materials such as charcoal, propane or gasoline. Within the first 24 hours of last week's storm, Duke's emergency department (ED) had registered 212 patients -- 35 of them with trauma injuries, 70 of them with CO exposure. Twelve of the 70 needed hyperbaric oxygen therapy in one of the Duke hyperbaric chambers. Treatment for CO poisoning is the delivery of pure oxygen, sometimes in a super-oxygenated hyperbaric chamber.

Two patients were sick enough to require admission to a critical care unit at Duke Hospital. Physicians estimated that roughly 60 percent of those treated were children and many of those needing treatment were from the Latino community.

"Our staff always has in mind that we need to be prepared to handle large numbers of patients," said Dr. Victoria Thornton, medical director of clinical operations for the ED. "The storm and the numbers of carbon monoxide poisonings represent a disaster event for the Duke community. We will always step up to make sure we treat as many patients as we possibly can; we may need to ask for additional resources, but we'll make sure every patient gets the treatment they need as soon as possible."

The ED instituted an electronic tracking system last May, which has helped identify staffing needs well in advance of predicted situations such as this storm. The tracking system, along with a new critical saturation plan that was established last month, helped keep the ED as efficient as possible, according to Thornton.

"We are really proud of the job our staff has done," Thornton said. "Their commitment and great attitude made dealing with this mass casualty incident almost look easy."

Of course, it wasn't easy. A large portion of the staff had worked double and even triple shifts by Friday afternoon to handle the ever-increasing number of patients seeking treatment.

"Our staff was phenomenal in their ability to stay focused and care for a very high number of seriously ill patients, even in the face of their own issues due to the storm," said Kathy Finch, clinical operations director for the ED. "Everyone was really supportive of one another and of our patients -- they pulled together and were awesome."

A number of groups and departments helped provide additional support for the ED staff, including respiratory therapy and hyperbaric medicine, social work, environmental services, interpreters, laundry services, valet services, Duke police and LifeFlight. Additionally, inpatient units added staffing and opened up beds on their floors to take patients admitted via the ED.

Grounds crews also had their hands full, said Glenn Reynolds, associate director of systems and engineering services for Duke's Facilities Management Department. By Friday morning, all main campus roads had been cleared of snow and ice and tree limbs, Reynolds said. Cleanup work continued this week

Campus residence halls were unaffected by the icy weather conditions. Shelters for off-campus students who were without heat and power were set up on both East and West campuses.

Many in the Duke community took advantage of the dining facilities on campus; record sales were recorded on Dec. 5, said Jim Wulforst, director of Dining Services.

Dining Services also coordinated with the City of Durham to feed city employees and the Durham police officers on campus, Wulforst said. "This was something we were happy to work out," he said.

Duke also provided hot food to scores of road crew members in need of a place to eat.

And on Friday night, the Intramural Building on West Campus was opened to provide shelter to Durham residents with special needs.

A long-standing procedure for handling severe weather -- including a pick-up and drop-off service for dining service employees -- enabled Wulforst and his staff to open nearly all operations on Thursday and again on Friday. In addition, a majority of the vendors who deliver food to students' rooms were open for business, as were the three campus grocery stores.

After a challenging day Thursday, the campus bus routes were up and fully operational Friday morning, said Joe Pietrantoni, associate vice president of Auxiliary Services for the university. Additional buses were added to ferry students to and from weekend basketball games at Cameron Indoor Stadium.

The news was not as good at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens, which was closed Dec. 5 through Tuesday. Visitors are now welcome to visit the gardens, but officials there warn visitors to be careful.

"This is the worst damage we've ever seen," said Greg Nace, associate director of horticulture for the gardens. "It's worse than Hurricane Fran. It's the worst ice storm anyone here has ever experienced. We've seen damage in the gardens before, but nothing on this scale."

A four-person crew of arborists reviewed the damage and estimated they have weeks of work ahead cutting down trees and clearing dangerous limbs.

Duke Forest will be closed to the public until further notice as work crews remove trees and other material from forest trails and roads. Judson Edeburn, Duke Forest resource manager, said he expected the forest to be closed at least several weeks. Additional information about Duke's severe weather policy is available on the Human Resources Web site. Blake Dickinson, Tracey Koepke, Keith Lawrence and Geoffrey Mock contributed to this story. Related Stories Shelter at the IM Surviving the Storm Why Trees Fall